BPX Book

Process First
The Evolution of the Business Process Expert

A collaborative book by
Marco ten Vaanholt and the SAP Business Process Expert community
Copyright 2008 by Evolved Media Network, LLC
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information
storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published by Evolved Technologist Press, an imprint of Evolved Media, 242 West
30th Street, Suite 801, New York, New York 10001
This book may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use.
For more information contact:
Evolved Technologist Press
(646) 827-2196
info@EvolvedTechnologist.com
www.EvolvedTechnologist.com
Editor/Analyst: Dan Woods, Deb Cameron
Copyeditor: Deb Cameron
Production Editor: Deb Gabriel
Cover and Design: Deb Gabriel
Cover Mural: Nancy Marguiles
First Edition: September 2008
While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the pub-
lisher and authors assume no responsibility for errors or omissions or for damages
resulting from the use of the information contained herein.
ISBN: 978-0-9789218-7-3; 0-9789218-7-9
Contents
Foreword by Zia Yusuf ............................................................................vii
Preface ...................................................................................................... xv
1 The Business Process Perspective .................................................... 1
2 The Solution Creation Process ....................................................... 15
3 Completing the Denition of the Business Process
Expert Role ........................................................................................ 31
4 The Business Process Expert Community .................................... 59
5 Organizational Change Management and the Business
Process Expert .................................................................................. 75
6 The Technology Environment for the Business
Process Expert .................................................................................. 95
7 Patterns of Success ......................................................................... 109
Afterword ............................................................................................... 115
vii
The creation of a book on the business process expert role by the
SAP Business Process Expert (BPX) community is an excellent illustra-
tion of SAPs enduring dedication to collaboration and innovation. Both
the business process expert role, and the community that surrounds it,
show how, in every way possible, SAP is attempting to lead the creation
of collaborative structures tailored to the needs of each specic player
in the customer and partner universe.
As the pace of business change accelerates and businesses become
increasingly connected, collaboration is a key resource, and business
networks provide the new source of competitive advantage. Business
process experts play an important role in this transformation, since a
deep understanding of process and of the orchestration of dynamic
business networks is key to delivering higher shared customer value,
speed of innovation, cost benetsand competitive differentiation.
With a deep history of business process expertise, it was only
natural for SAP to play an early role in acknowledging the emergence of
the business process expert. In 2006, as part of our ecosystem strategy,
SAP formed the Business Process Expert community (bpx.sap.com)
one of our Communities of Innovation. The Business Process Expert
Foreword
by Zia Yusuf, Executive Vice President, Global Ecosystem &
Partner Group, SAP AG
Process First: The Evolution of the Business Process Expert viii
community has quickly become the leading global business process
community and examines the subject of business process manage-
ment from the perspective of a comprehensive set of industries and
horizontal areas.
Within the community, industry experts, business analysts, imple-
mentation and application consultants, process developers, enterprise
architects, and many others engage in moderated forums, wikis,
expert blogs, and other collaborative tools to drive process innovation
and solution design. The community collaborates across company
boundaries, shares ideas, develops and renes business processes, and
leverages the benets of service-oriented architecture (SOA). Through
collaboration, best-practice sharing, and collective learning, the com-
munity bridges the gap between business and IT and enables business
process platform adoption.
Orchestrating a Customer-Focused Ecosystem
To foster collaboration among customers, partners, and indi-
viduals, SAP has embraced an ecosystem strategy that brings together
award-winning solutions, comprehensive services, and the power of
collaboration among diverse companies and individuals, to give
customers the power to operate more effectively.
Every day, our customers are tasked to deliver breakthrough results
through accelerated innovation and improved ROI. Service-oriented
architecture transforms the way software is developed and imple-
mented. Faced with competing investment alternatives and constant
pressure for IT to keep pace with shifting business demands, cus-
tomers are rethinking success and what it takes to be agile, integrated,
and exible to respond to change and complex pressuresto do more,
and deliver more effectively.
SAP believes that maximizing success requires an ecosystem
approach that puts the customer in the center. Dealing with market
challenges and pressure to innovate at speeds that often exceed busi-
ness capacity, SAP customers trust they can turn to the SAP ecosystem
to collaborate more effectively, compensate for weak areas, decrease
Foreword ix
time to market, improve performance, and access information more
effectively.
The Rising Importance of IT and the Business Process
Expert in Enabling Collaboration
According to a recent survey conducted by BusinessWeek Research
Services and commissioned by SAP AG (Getting Serious About
Collaboration: How Companies Are Transforming Their Business
Networks, June 2008), C-level executives are increasingly turning
to collaboration as a way to win new markets and address quickly
evolving customer needs. The executives surveyed plan to expand
their collaboration efforts even further over the next three years,
and emphasized the importance of information technology (IT)
and its role in facilitating integration to support their companies
business goals of increased levels of collaboration with customers,
partners, and suppliers.
While the ndings of this survey conrm that collaboration is
being increasingly recognized as a pathway to growth, innovation,
and competitive differentiation, only half of the C-level executives
responding to the survey are condent that their IT infrastructures
will be able to support their collaboration strategies during the next
three years. This result underscores the crucial role IT plays in facili-
tating collaboration and enabling business transformation within
the enterprise. While CEOs are embracing the concept of develop-
ing customer-centric business models by optimizing the companys
network of employees, suppliers, customers, partners, and distribu-
tors, ITand the business process expertneed to play a strategic
role to make it all work.
The SAP ecosystem includes:
Trusted, targeted partner solutions and services
Unique communities of innovation
Flexible business process platforms for collaboration
Trusted, Targeted Partner Solutions and Services
As a valuable advisor to customers, SAP provides trusted, targeted
partner solutions and services through many initiatives and programs.
Process First: The Evolution of the Business Process Expert x
To meet this goal, we work closely with leading software partners,
technology partners, and service partners. And, we draw on our more
than 30 years of experience in creating world-class, business-process
solutions, along with industry specic solution maps, to make sure
customers have access to the right partners, with the right solutions,
at the right time.
Unique Communities of Innovation
Every SAP customer has the opportunity to be a co-innovator. SAP
ecosystem communities encompass customers, partners, and individu-
als who share ideas, technical and business expertise, and experiences
to tackle critical business needs. SAPs community-powered ecosystem
provides customers with a task- and role-based approach to quickly
and easily engage with the wealth of resources available.
Consistent Foundation for Collaboration with the Business
Process Platform
All SAP solutions share key components that address common,
cross-industry business processes in a unique business process plat-
form. All SAP ecosystem members can collaborate to create extensible,
compatible, and fully integrated business solutions that meet customer
and partner needs. A common approach and language enables the SAP
ecosystem to create valuable service denitions, co-innovate across
industries, and enable participation and leadership in industry stan-
dards groups.
Through our ecosystem of partners and customers, we are helping
to accelerate innovation and improve return on investment for our
customers. The SAP ecosystem brings together diverse relationships,
resources, and communities to help create the next generation of
technology solutions in concert with our own development efforts. Our
approach takes us well beyond the partnering model followed by many
rms in our industry. The ecosystem is fueled by the collaborative
processconnecting SAP with partners, customers, and individuals
to achieve common goals. And there are many implications of this
Foreword xi
collaborative approach along with our focus on maximizing customer
value. Lets examine three of those implications.
The frst implication is that the ecosystem must have the proper
business context. Customers expect that solutions will be appro-
priate for their industry and meet their business process needs.
For that reason, the SAP ecosystem has a very strong industry
focus where customers and partners can shape industry solutions
and product roadmaps. For example, through the ecosystem we
provide Industry Value Networks where customers and partners
work together to develop leading industry solutions. We also have,
at the rst release of this book, more than 400,000 members in our
Business Process Expert community who share business process
best practices and thousands of partners who help deploy SAP
software in specic industries.
The second implication is that the ecosystem resources need
to be quickly accessible and appropriate to the needs of the
specic person or company. This is accomplished through our
Communities of Innovation, which provide ecosystem stakehold-
ers with the ability to leverage the power of community to get what
they need, when they need it. SAPs Communities of Innovation
provide a role- and task-based approach to engage with the wealth
of resources available through the ecosystem. Developers can
engage with more than 1.2 million other developers in the SAP
Developer Network (SDN); customers and partners can engage with
each other in our Enterprise Services Community to create new
service denitions that meet their business requirements; Business
Process Experts can engage with each other in our Business Process
Expert community; and more. This community approach achieves
tremendous results. For example, in our SDN community there are
more than 5,500 postings per day and the average response time to a
posted question is less than 18 minutes. Communities also provide
SAP with the best possible way to reect the voice of our customer
in our own products. For example, in the latest SAP enhancement
package, more than 50% of the enterprise service bundles delivered
were developed via the SAP Ecosystem.
Process First: The Evolution of the Business Process Expert xii
The third implication is the need to orchestrate co-innovation
among the stakeholder participants. The value of the ecosystem
is maximized when its capabilities are linked. Through the ecosys-
tem, we are bringing together diverse relationships, resources, and
communities to help create the next generation of great solutions
in concert with our own development efforts. For example, one of
our Strategic SAP Technology Partners actively engages in the SAP
Developer Network, the BPX community, and the High Technology
Industry Value Network. When the company was about to release
a new product, it worked with SAP and leveraged the ecosystem for
product input, thereby leading to the development of a superior
product with faster developer acceptance.
For SAP, the ecosystem is all about creating a valuable customer
resource. This is an ongoing journey as we work with our customers
and partners to create the best possible experience.
A Community-Authored Book
At its core, collaboration is a balance between emergence and
control. If, as a sponsor of a community, you expect the community to
only represent your views and priorities, you will be sadly disappointed.
Communities have their own desires and will movealong their own
timelinein the direction they choose to go. If, on the other hand, as
a sponsor of a community, you are afraid to go rst and seed discus-
sions, your community will not realize its collaborative potential.
This book represents a fascinating experiment that attempts to walk
the ne line between orchestration and control by providing a seed
for parts of a book and then seeking input from the community. Some
parts of the book were rst presented to the community in a nished
state. Other parts of the book started out more skeletal. One chapter
began as an empty shell. The community is still reacting to this content
and commenting, changing, criticizing, and praising the content, all in
a way that will ultimately improve the book.
As one of the leaders of efforts to promote collaboration in the
broader SAP ecosystem, I have long wanted to see a thorough and com-
Foreword xiii
plete explanation of the business process expert role. It appears that
working together, BPX community members and SAP staff, along with
professional researchers and writers, are creating a better book than
could have ever been created by one of those groups working alone.
We hope that you nd the results of these efforts helpful and become
moved to join in the process of making this content even better.
Zia Yusuf
Executive Vice President
Global Ecosystem & Partner Group, SAP AG
xv
Preface
One thing we know for sure: All over the world people are calling
themselves business process experts and are working to improve the
quality and accelerate the pace of solutions created for their organi-
zations. We know this because those people are using SAPs Business
Process Expert community to explain what they do and to celebrate
their successes.
What we were less sure of is exactly what business process experts
are doing to achieve these results. However, during the creation of this
book, more indicative trends have become clear. We know that business
process experts are advocates for the business process perspective, the
idea that a clear denition of a business process should be the founda-
tion for creating efcient process and technology solutions. We know
that business process experts help the business side communicate with
the technology side. We know that they solve problems in requirements
gathering, conict resolution, training, and many other areas. But the
reports coming in tell many tales. We hear of business process experts
who are primarily communicators. We hear of others who represent
the business point of view in the solution creation process. We hear of
people who merely make up business process inventory to comply with
Process First: The Evolution of the Business Process Expert xvi
regulatory standards. We hear of others who use modeling and visual
development tools to prototype solutions or teach users to do this for
themselves. These are merely facets of the business process expert role
that have inuenced the direction of this book.
Now that enough people have joined the party and a signicant
amount of experience has been gained, it has become possible to
understand the many faces of the business process expert. This chapter
attempts to look at the solution creation process as it is practiced in the
modern world of Information Technology (IT) and identify the skills
business process experts bring to the table and how those skills are
combined into different types of roles.
To bring some order to this analysis we will proceed as follows:
In Chapter 1, we will clear the decks with respect to the funda-
mental concept driving the business process expert, by examin-
ing the history of the term business process and the way that the
concept has become central to the way business is conducted in the
modern world. We will look at the business process reengineering
movement, the way that enterprise software is driven by business
processes, the drivers of business process standardization, and
how all these currents have combined to lead to the denition of
end-to-end business processes that span all companies participat-
ing in a business network.
Next, we will examine how the business process expert is an
advocate for the business process perspective, the notion that
businesses should be driven and solution creation and automation
should be guided by business process champions with a business
process perspective. One central assumption of this book is that to
be a business process expert in the most complete sense, you must
be an advocate for the business process perspective and use that
mode of thinking to guide everything you do.
In Chapter 2, we will review the solution creation process to estab-
lish a clear view of the playing eld that business process experts
inhabit when, with a denition of a business process in hand, they
turn to technology to help with automation and supporting func-
tionality. We will review the problems that commonly occur in the
solution creation process and the long-term trends that have led to
the creation and evolution of the business process expert role.
Preface xvii
In Chapter 3, we will analyze the different personalities and styles
of business process experts and the skills employed to improve
the quality and speed of business process design and solution
creation.
In Chapter 4, we describe the SAP Business Process Expert com-
munity (BPX community). Started in 2006 and now over 400,000
members strong, the BPX community offers a rich panoply of
resources for collaboration, which are explored in this chapter.
By refning and helping to optimize business processes, business
process experts become agents of change. Chapter 5 discusses the
important area of organizational change management and the
challenges faced by business process experts in helping organiza-
tions make often difcult changes for the better.
Chapter 6 describes the technological toolkit of the business
process expert, which includes Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis,
blogs, twitter, and IM, as well as business process modeling tools.
Chapter 7 describes patterns of success. This chapter identi-
es several types of patterns of success, including patterns that
promote adoption of the business process expert role, patterns that
promote creation of successful solution, and patterns for optimal
communication, collaboration, and organizational structure. This
chapter is largely a work in progress, though it already features a
substantial contribution from the community.
The book concludes with an Afterword that describes the process
used to create this edition of the book and the plan for going
forward. After all, the canonical version of this book iseven as
you read thison the BPX wiki. You can nd it by visiting bpx.sap.
com or simply by googling Your Community BPX Book.
Contributions from the Community
Throughout the book, youll nd boxes that highlight content that
was added via the wiki. Sometimes community members directly edited
the text, and those changes became part of the body of the chapter.
Sometimes members suggested the addition of substantive content;
such suggestions are being held for the next edition of the book (which
is already an ongoing effort on the wiki for this book).
Process First: The Evolution of the Business Process Expert xviii
This book was created in a hybrid fashion that combined research
interviews and writing from the Editors and the Evolved Media
team with comments on the content harvested from the community
members about early versions of the content.
We would like to especially thank those members of the community
who contributed, either directly or by interview:
John Alden Gail Lipschitz
Axel Angeli Nancy Marguiles
Yvonne Antonucci Ashish Mehta
Bob Austin Alexander Ob
Kerry Brown Kieran O'Connor
Richard Campione OwenPettiford
Juan Carlos Carracedo Marilyn Pratt
Paul Centen Jon Reed
Ajay Ganpat Chavan Ann Rosenberg
Uwe Dittes Prasad Sammidi
Mark Finnern Natascha Schuberth Thomson
Anne Fish Kelly Schwager
Andre Fonseca Jim Spath
David Frankel Steve Strout
Tanya Furlan Matt Stultz
Ginger Gatling Helen Sunderland
Mo Ghanem Puneet Suppal
Pinaki Ghosh Paul Taylor
Swati Gokhale Arun Varadarajan
Frauke Hassdenteufel Jochen Vatter
Sumarno Chandra Hie Anbazhagan Sam Venkatesan
Volker Hildebrand David Vonk
Richard Hirsch Aaron Williams
Phil Kisloff Mark Yolton
Paul Kurchina Zia Yusuf
David Lincourt
Preface xix
Whether or not your name is listed here, wed like to invite you to
join in the conversation and comment on what you read here. Please
visit the wiki for this book and help us improve it.
Key Starting Points
The BPX Community site (bpx.sap.com), which has many resources,
among which is the wiki for this book. You can nd it by clicking
on wiki from bpx.sap.com or by googling Your Community BPX
Book.
1
T
oo often in discussions of the business process expert role, a
precise denition of the term business process is never estab-
lished. The term has been around for so many years and is used by so
many people that everyone assumes a common understanding. In this
book, we are going to start from the beginning and attempt to establish
a clear denition of business process by looking at where the term came
from and how it has bee n used in different contexts. We realize that
attempting to capture all connotations of a term like business process
is beyond the scope of this book. Our purpose is simply to explain the
meanings that are relevant to the business process expert role.
Reengineering and Business Processes
While the analysis of business processes dates back to Adam Smith,
who in 1776 described the step-by-step division of labor in pin facto-
ries in The Wealth of Nations, the modern emphasis on the term dates
from 1990 when Michael Hammer and James Champy introduced the
concept of business process reengineering. Hammer and Champy
dene a process as a collection of activities that takes one or more
kinds of input and creates an output that is of value to the customer.
The Business Process Perspective: Key to the
Business Process Expert Role 1
Process First: The Evolution of the Business Process Expert
2
The essence of their approach was to encourage business executives to
take a step back from the details of what was going on in their business
and to think about what needed to be done to create value for their
customer. The goal in performing this analysis is to increase efciency
and eliminate unnecessary work.
Reengineering proved extremely popular in the early 1990s in
the US and other countries, as threats from global competition had
increased the pressure to improve product quality and cut costs
(remember the ISO 9000 craze?). The concept was adopted by some
companies with noted success and criticized by others as attempting
to enforce an overly mechanized view of how work gets done. By the
mid 1990s, enthusiasm for the concept started to wane but the term
business process remained an important part of the business lexicon.
From the Wiki: The Business Process Perspective
This chapter is new to this book (that is, it was not originally
included on the wiki) but was born from comments received both
on the wiki and in interviews that we needed a greater emphasis
on how the business process expert champions the business process
perspective. The authors would like to thank those who gave us this
feedback, particularly David Frankel.
For the business process expert role, there are two observations
that we think are relevant. The rst is that the notion of taking a step
back and focusing on the optimal design of the process for creating
value without regard to the technology used to automate or support
that process is a powerful rst principle. This book uses the term busi-
ness process perspective to refer to this way of thinking.
The second observation is that one of the barriers to the success
of business process reengineering was in the exibility of IT systems
at the time. In the 1990s, the movement to implement ERP and other
systems of record was just gaining steam. The congurability and ex-
ibility of these systems was far more limited than the software in todays
enterprise. In addition, support for collaboration and information
management was a fraction of what it is today and far less emphasized.
As a result, business process reengineering was held back signicantly
Chapter 1: The Business Process Perspective 3
because technology itself could only play a small role in supporting the
optimal process. The idea was sound; we believe it was just ahead of its
time.
Business Processes and Enterprise Software
Enterprise software applications provide another important foun-
dation for the business process expert role. Enterprise software solu-
tions, like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship
Management (CRM), or Supply Chain Management (SCM), and others
act as systems of record for the enterprise and record data that keeps
track of the state of assets and activity. Applications also help automate
business processes such as creating purchase orders, invoice process-
ing, and order management and provide support for analyzing data
and creating reports. Enterprise applications can also recognize and
respond to various events that occur based on business activity, such
as the expiration of a time limit for receipt of payment for an invoice,
which may trigger a dunning letter.
In order for an enterprise application provided by a software
vendor like SAP to succeed, it must be able to implement a process
that is common to many companies and handle as much as possible
of the differences between those processes by means of conguration.
In other words, for an enterprise application to succeed, it must have
embedded in it a deep understanding of a core business process and
all the variations on that process. An accounting system, for example,
must be able to handle US Generally Accepted Accounting Practices
(GAAP) and European GAAP in the same system, switching on and off
capabilities and applicable rules based on what country, division, or
area the software solution is being used in.
In a sense, a business process expert plays the same role that
the product managers and designers play in an enterprise software
company. Business process experts must be able to look at the busi-
ness processes in a company and assemble a solution that allows as
much exibility as possible to meet needs that are likely to occur.
Flexibility isnt required everywhere. Rather, companies usually have
a core set of value-creating processes that are the focus of innovation
4
and optimization. The business process expert should play a leading
role in helping business executives, enterprise architects, and the CIO
craft the existing and future business process and solution landscape.
The right combination of processes, solutions, and infrastructure will
allow innovation and optimization to take place at the lowest possible
cost and impact, just as well-designed enterprise applications allow
customer needs to be met through conguration. In both cases, the
optimal state occurs because the designers understood the scope of
current and anticipated needs and prepared for them.
Success in the design of exible and often cross-organizational
business solutions is not the result of luck or accidents, but rather is the
result of a deep understanding of the challenges faced by a business.
Business process experts can learn from the general approach that
enterprise software vendors like SAP take toward embedding business
processes in their software. SAP for example has an integrated set of
communities that gather high-level industry specic requirements
(Industry Value Networks), design applicable code called web services
(Enterprise Services Community), and then incorporate those services
into the design of its products. SAP customers and partners participate
in the Industry Value Networks and the Enterprise Services Community,
bringing a wide breadth of experience to bear. SAP product managers
also collect requirements from direct interaction with customers,
through customer advisory councils, through user groups, and from
analyst rms.
The process of gathering requirements and designing a product for
a software vendor may involve hundreds or even thousands of people. It
often takes place in cycles that span months or even years. Informally,
business process experts can cast the same sort of wide net and imitate
this process. They can systematically reach out to the people in the
company who have knowledge and experience, like enterprise archi-
tects and executives, who are looking at dening the best path forward
for the business.
In addition, business process experts must be well versed in the
ways that enterprise software applications support business processes
as they craft solutions that automate the optimal processes for a
company. Of course, the optimal process may sometimes have to be
compromised based on practical considerations. At times, it may make
sense to take a step back from the optimal process and implement
something that ts more easily with the existing capabilities of an
enterprise software package, if the compromise does not greatly reduce
the business value obtained.
The goal, of course, is to compromise as little as possible and imple-
ment solutions that are as close as possible to the current understanding
of the optimal business process. Much of the excitement surrounding
business process management (BPM), service-oriented architecture
(SOA), and the associated tools for modeling business processes and
building systems is driven by the hope that such techniques will reduce
the gap between the optimal process and the capabilities of enterprise
software to support it. The more knowledge business process experts
have about the requirements for the optimal process, the capabilities of
enterprise applications, and the potential for BPM and SOA, the better
prepared they will be for playing a leading role in creating solutions
that drive companies future strategies and products.
Business Process Standardization
Another valuable source of inspiration for business process experts
can be found in the way business processes have been standardized
in various industries and functional areas. When you take your credit
card around the world and nd you can pay for dinner in Mumbai, buy a
book on Amazon from your desk in Palo Alto, purchase tickets to the FC
Bayern Munchen game in Munich, or rent a surf board in Costa Rica, all
with a similar experience during the purchase no matter where you are,
it is all based on implementation of standardized business processes
and the business models that support them.
The world of standards is vast and complex and full of both positive
and negative examples. The Internet is perhaps the biggest victory ever
for technology standards, although the fact that your cell phone works
in all the places you can use your credit card is not far behind. Supply
chain business standards are, for instance, much more developed
than other areas because the economics of global supply chains have
6
brought a large return on investment for creating and adhering to these
standards. In other industries, standardization has crept along slowly
and not made much progress.
Standards are sometimes developed by government, other times
by consortia of companies who are interested in improving efciency,
and other times by one powerful player, such as Wal-Mart, which has
been pressing for adoption of a standardized approach to RFID by its
suppliers.
Business process experts need to be able to interact with and
understand standards for business processes at many different levels.
From an industry perspective, it is obviously important to understand
the applicable standards and employ them in solutions. Companies
can also benet from playing a role in setting or improving standards.
Much of the activity in modern standards-setting is focused on the
development of web service APIs that allow business to be transacted
safely and securely across company boundaries.
Just as business process experts can imitate the designers of enter-
prise software, they can also apply the broader lessons of standards
setting to their own companies and ecosystems of partners. One
common pattern of standardization is applied to the nancial rollup
of acquired companies. Instead of converting acquired companies
to a common ERP system, some conglomerates have dened a set of
web services that answers queries for nancial information required
for statutory reporting. To become part of the nancial rollup, the
acquired company must implement these web services. Using this
approach, acquisitions can be fully integrated into the nancial report-
ing processes in a matter of weeks. Business process experts frequently
nd opportunities for similar standardization in their day-to-day work
consulting at companies. As standardization increases, they nd that
their focus is far more about creating effective applications to achieve
business results than achieving efciencies through standards. In other
words, standardization paves the way for innovation. For people who
use only landlines, it is a lot more difcult to understand the benets of
an iPhone than it is for people who already have a cell phone.
The Business Process Perspective
It is all well and good to recommend that business process experts
should be advocates for the business process perspective, the point
of view that recommends rst understanding what your ideal way of
working should be, and then seeking support to make that happen
using technology as well as cultural change. But this is just the begin-
ning. A complete denition of the business process perspective adds
more meat to this concept and addresses how a company must change,
add, or remove inefcient processes, how communication must occur,
and how solutions must evolve in order to reap the most benets.
What we now offer is an initial attempt at eshing out the concept
of the business process perspective and making it more useful. Like any
initial attempt at an ambitious concept, it is likely that this denition
will spark disagreement. Our hope is that such disagreement leads to
rapid incremental improvement of these ideas. That the canonical form
of this book is on a wiki that is available to be changed and commented
on should make it easier for everyone who has the passion to join this
debate to enter the conversation and help push this idea in the right
direction.
Our work so far with the SAP Business Process Expert community
(BPX community for short) has led us to the following denition of the
business process perspective:
The business process perspective means thinking in terms of the
largest picture. How does a business process being dened relate to
other processes inside and outside the boundaries of the company?
How does the work ow in and out of the process? What events and
content must be communicated to and from other processes?
The business process perspective means thinking in terms of the
process not the software implementation. What are the inputs and
outputs to the process and what transformation is taking place that
creates value for the customer? What are the ideal steps involved,
not the steps that have developed for historical reasons or because
of convenience? What parts of the process can be implemented
now and which may have to wait for later? How can we keep the
ideal process in mind so we can move toward it as opportunities for
improvement arise?
8
The business process perspective means documenting business
processes so that everyone can see their role and how it ts into
the big picture. What is the grand plan for creating value? How is
that strategy linked to the processes we perform everyday? How do
we keep track of our progress and performance? What must each
role performing a process know about what is happening before
and after to do the best job? What must we know about our part-
ners, and they about us, to do the best job for the customer? How
can we document processes in ways that will be understandable by
everyone involved?
The business process perspective means a commitment to con-
tinuous, incremental process improvement. How can we test our
vision of the ideal process against the experience we gain every
day? How can we allow everyone involved to make suggestions for
improvements? How can we institutionalize the process of taking
incremental steps forward? How can we incorporate new technol-
ogy capabilities that may support process improvements? How can
we continuously identify processes that need further investment
and processes that need to be removed? What evaluation frame-
work should we use ?
The business process perspective means a commitment to adapt
the organization to support the process focus. How should lines
of authority and the ow of information be transformed to focus
both management and staff on the efcient execution and optimi-
zation of the core processes of the business? What are the design
principles behind the current organizational structure? How can
change be managed in the least disruptive way possible? How will
people be trained to play new roles?
The business process perspective means a commitment from
senior management to work through challenges that are inherent
in the transformation process. How can management express its
support for the vision of an organization centered around business
processes? How will management be informed when the time
is needed for intervention to maintain the course in the face of
difculties and obstacles? How will management help maintain
momentum for change in the face of the inevitable frustrations
and shortfalls in performance involved in learning new ways of
working?
Puneet Suppal, an SOA strategy architect at Capgemini, describes
a company that is organized around the business process perspective
as a business process enterprise. If you are still looking at these things
separately in different chunks, youre going to manage them in sepa-
rate chunks, Suppal says. There is going to be inefcient overlap of
activity, or there are going to be gaps when one process may assume
that something is being addressed in another. But if you look at the
work entirely as a complete process, you would be able to reduce inef-
ciencies. You would be able to see how things move end to end. Youd
identify where all your problems are, and youd be able to manage the
business better.
The benet of adopting the business process perspective and
becoming a business process enterprise is that each part of the end-
to-end process understands its role and the signicance of what it is
doing. Everyone has visibility into what is going on up and down the
chain and can make better decisions and take action to make processes
work better. Such a situation will not occur by accident. It is the result
of a detailed vision, crafted from a deep understanding of what a busi-
ness needs to do to succeed and a recognition that the vision will be
improved based on experience. Only by creating a wider consciousness
in the enterprise of such a vision and taking a methodical approach
to gradually moving toward that vision can a business reach its true
potential. Further, as companies move increasingly beyond their own
boundaries, the ability to incorporate those end-to-end processes
throughout the value chain could initially be differentiating and create
substantial value.
An Advocate for the Process Perspective
As an advocate for the business process perspective, it is not the
primary task of business process experts to lead the process of trans-
formation. Rather, it is their task to convince the organization that the
business process perspective is the right way to organize a business so
that many leaders can emerge from all levels of the organization and
10
effect change to improve business results. In that respect, the rst
thing that a business process expert must do is, in essence, get him
or herself elected as a credible representative of the business process
perspective.
Lets imagine that a business process expert was running for the
position of advocate for the business process perspective and had to
convince other employees to elect him or her. Perhaps the best way to
summarize the way that a business process expert would pursue such
advocacy is to imagine what kind of speech he or she would give to an
audience of voters to gain their support. Such a speech might sound
like this:
My fellow employees, please allow me a moment to let you all know why
I want to be elected as advocate of the business process perspective and
what I plan to do if elected.
First of all, I am not going to run a negative campaign. I know that some
of you are cynical about change in general and technology in particular.
Im not going to dwell on past failures caused by applying technology
without using the business process perspective.
I am not going to blame IT staff who sometimes overpromised but under-
delivered because they were excited about technology functionality but
forgot to consider business value.
I am not going to criticize people who think only in terms of existing
applications and ignore what technologies like mashups and composite
applications could do.
I am not going to get mad at people who see everything in terms of devel-
opment tools and turn every challenge into a custom development proj-
ect in ABAP or Java or Ruby on Rails.
I wont waste time worrying about perfectionists who invent ornate
business processes. It is great to be ambitious, but we must always test
requirements against experience.
I especially am not going to enter into a tirade against people who resist
change by protecting their turf or refusing to learn new techniques. We
must have compassion for people who resist change because the world
seems to make them suffer for their attitude.
To dwell on such negativity would get in the way of the important work
we have to do to move this company toward the business process per-
spective.
I have thrown my hat in the ring for the honor of helping advocate for
the business process perspective because we are a good company on the
way to being great. I know one thing for sure. We are not going to get
there unless each and every person in this company knows what must be
achieved and why. Everyone must know why their job is important and
their place in the overall process.
It shouldnt take much faith to believe that adopting the business process
perspective can help us. If there werent commonality in business pro-
cesses, enterprise software like ERP wouldnt have become billion dollar
industries.
Looking at how technology standards like web services led to business
process standards, the power of the business process perspective is clear.
Amazon and eBay now take in almost as much revenue through their
web service APIs as they do from their web sites.
Both enterprise software and standards are based on the business pro-
cess perspective. Part of adopting the business process perspective means
focusing on making our businesses run properly, not focusing on tech-
nology. After we understand what to do, we can focus on how to get tech-
nology to help. Too often, technology is so exciting that we let the how
crowd out the what.
Making the most of the business process perspective means understand-
ing where we are with respect to business processes. In some areas,
everyone is aware of each other, with core processes automated and the
important data captured. We share information and optimize perfor-
mance by tuning processes.
In other areas of our company, we have little awareness of the big pic-
ture. The processes were not consciously designed, but emerged by acci-
dent based on application capabilities or an inadequate understanding
of the needs of the business. In these areas, we must take a step back and
think about the right way to do business, looking at it from an outsiders
perspective. We must communicate that vision, rene it, and incremen-
tally move toward it.
The work of the business process expert is the art of the possible because
the next step we take is rarely a leap to a full implementation of our
12
vision. The only way to nd out if our vision for the optimal process is
correct is to try parts of it and see if our instincts were right. Much of the
time, experience shows us that only part of our vision was needed.
I think this is the best time ever to be a business process expert. We have
a rich technology foundation. Enterprise applications like ERP are in
place and working well. Web services combine data and functionality
into composite applications. Web 2.0 technologies like blogs and wikis
create a rich fabric for collaboration. If we start with the process, we will
all reap the benets.
As excited as I am, we must be humble. If this were easy, everyone would
have done it already. Sometimes we will be faced with seemingly impos-
sible problems. There will be bumps in the road. Change is never easy
and thats why learning how to change provides us with an advantage.
So, if you dont elect me, please elect somebody to champion the business
process perspective. I think that changing our collective thinking to be
focused on business process is the most important thing we can do to
ensure our future success.
It is exciting to imagine that if we could just vote for someone to
be an advocate for the business process perspective, our companies
would just change for the better. Also the business process perspective
acts as a solid basis. Processes do not change as often as technology
does, especially in our agile dynamic global world. As we all know, it
is much harder than that. The business process expert is just one actor
on a stage lled with C-level executives, line of business managers, and
business users on one side and IT managers, architects, and developers
on the other. The business process experts, enterprise architects, busi-
ness analysts, solution consultants, and project managers are in the
middle, attempting to bridge the two worlds. Even if everyone on the
stage is committed to the business process perspective, there is a whole
other category of work to be done in the realm of creating solutions that
support business processes that we will address in chapter 2.
The rst mission of the business process expert, the one related to
advocating for the business process perspective, tells us where we want
to go. But getting there involves embedding this vision and the related
automation processes in the real world, in real applications. This is
where the business process expert plays a different role, one that is
not an advocate for a new way of thinking but one that is based on the
ability to use empathy and communicate across boundaries. Chapter 2
explores the role of the business process expert in the solution creation
process.
15
T
he reason the business process expert role is needed in the solu-
tion creation process is two-fold. First, the tools for creating
solutions have become vast and, because of that, often more complex
and someone has to be expert in understanding the business potential
of the functionality and how to apply the tools in a process-oriented
fashion. Second, the business process expert must understand the
requirements that the business is attempting to meet and communi-
cate those to the technology side. In both of these roles, the business
process expert uses empathy for technology and for business needs
to make sure that communication ows as it should and solutions are
built that actually help the business perform better.
Overview of the Solution Creation Process
To understand the second half of the business process expert role,
we must take a closer look at how solutions are created and the prob-
lems that typically occur. Creating an accurate, generic, universally
applicable model for solution creation is a tall order. What we hope to
do with the following model is identify the most important activities
and processes that take place during solution creation so that we can
2
The Solution Creation Process
Process First: The Evolution of the Business Process Expert 16
better focus our analysis of what business process experts do and how
they do it. Our generic model of solution creation is shown in Figure 2-1
on page 17.
From the Wiki: The Solution Creation Process Summary
This solution creation process summary is truly a collaborative
effort. Community members suggested the addition of business
case building, user-centric design, and change management, among
other topics, and added renement to descriptions and challenges.
Ginger Gatling suggested that the user feedback gathered at the
end of the process should loop back as input into future solution
design.
Here is a brief description of the activities and processes in the
Solution Creation Model along with associated challenges.
Activity/Process Description Challenges
Communication Communication must
occur along many
vectors between people
who do not speak the
same language and have
the same motivations.
Making sure that
everyone understands
each other and takes the
time to communicate and
listen.
Failure Anatomist Frequently a business
process expert is called
on because things
have not gone well in
previous attempts at
creating solutions. The
business process expert
can be more effective if
the reasons for failure
can be discovered.
Building trust to get
the real story of what
happened in the past.
Addressing the external
factors that may have led
to failure.
Table is continued on page 18
Chapter 2: The Solution Creation Process 17
Figure 2-1: Generic Solution Creation Process Summary
Project Evangelist Business process
experts are often the
best positioned to
communicate the value
of a project to the rest
of the company and
prepare others for the
roles they must play in
supporting the project.
Generating excitement
about the goals for the
project. Motivating
people to do what must
be done to make the
project successful.
Conict
Resolution,
Negotiation,
andMediation
Tempers can are when
making decisions about
what a solution will do
and what it will not do.
Disagreements can be
based on deeply held
values and interests.
Finding a way to come
to agreement and move
forward in a positive way,
in which everyone feels
fairly treated.
Governance The solutions created
must meet the needs
of the business strategy
of the company. They
must also t into an
enterprise architecture
development
methodology.
Gaining the time of
senior executives to
make decisions about
key issues. Ensuring that
proposed projects t with
governance structure.
Business and
Technology
Alignment
The needs of the
business for automation
and information must
be balanced against the
difculty of creating
specic functionality.
Striking the right
balance so that business
requirements are met
but large investments in
functionality of dubious
benet are avoided.
Business Case
Building
Business process experts
may be called upon to
help build a business
case for a project.
Assessing the business
case in light of how
it would impact the
company as a whole and
what types of change it
would bring.
The table is continued on page 20
Even a quick look at the processes and activities involved in the solu-
tion creation process makes the importance of strong communication
skills immediately clear. User requirements must be captured and com-
municated to technologists. Comments from users must be harvested.
Knowledge must be transferred through training. Questions about the
capabilities of software must be answered. In most of these cases, there
is both a business and a technical aspect to the communication.
The other characteristic of these processes and activities is that
they frequently require that business and technology considerations be
understood and balanced. For example, it is usually better to do without
a feature that is expensive to develop unless the need for that feature
has been clearly established. Sometimes using standard approaches is
not worth the sacrices that must be made with respect to the optimal
process. Other times new technologies cancel out gaps between the
ideal processes and what was possible to implement. But to make these
tradeoffs, you must understand both the potential business impact and
the associated costs. Too often during solution creation, miscommuni-
cation results in a very expensive solution that does not meet business
needs and is not technically sound for the long term.
Changing Nature of IT Solution Creation
Over the past 20 years, a series of trends have culminated in todays
environment in which the business process expert role is thriving. To
understand why the business process expert role is succeeding, we
must understand the changes that have occurred in solution creation
and the demands those changes are making on IT departments.
Development Methods: From the Waterfall to Agile
The traditional method of development is usually called the
waterfall methodology because development proceeds forward in a
cascading series of steps. In the typical waterfall process, systems are
created or large projects are managed by starting with a requirements
gathering process, then a system is designed based on those require-
ments, and then the system is implemented, tested, and deployed. This
method has been used widely in all sorts of engineering domains.
Project Portfolio
Analysis and
Prioritization
There are always more
projects requested than
capacity to ll them. The
most important projects
must be prioritized.
Understanding the
business value, the
investment, and risk
associated with each
project and providing
qualitative and
quantitative data needed
for management to
approve the projects.
Project Planning
and Design
Projects must be
constructed so that
development proceeds
with proper milestones,
input is received from all
interested parties, and
the requirements for the
solution are clear and
agreed upon.
Making sure that
technologists just dont
take the requirements
spec and run with it and
then make decisions
based on technical
concerns and ignore how
the solution will serve the
business process.
Project
Management
Making sure the project
goes according to plan.
Keeping communication
owing and instilling
an appropriate sense
of urgency. Keeping
project managers
informed of technical
interdependencies and
adjustments needed to
the project plan.
Business Process
Analysis and
Design
Dening, apart from
the implementation, a
business process that will
serve the needs of the
business.
Thinking in terms of
end-to-end processes
rather than the software
that implements them.
Engaging end users in
the exploration of both
in-system as well as off-
system processes.
Requirements
Gathering
Gathering from users the
requirements that the
solution must satisfy.
Separating the true
business requirements as
opposed to items that are
nice to have.
The table continues on page 22
From the Wiki: The Importance of Application Testing
Community member Ajay Ganpat Chavan highlights an activity in
which the business process expert can play an important role: appli-
cation testing. Depending on the impact of the change, the business
process expert may get involved in preparing test plans, approving
test plans, and even in the testing itself.
The waterfall method usually applied to creating IT solutions
has been widely criticized and often leads to failure of the resulting
solutions. It turns out that collecting requirements for a solution is
far harder than it may seem. Much of the time the conversation about
requirements between business and IT is dominated by technical
considerations. Because the business side lacks the technical language
to express requirements in sufcient detail, the conversation between
business and technology about solutions is dominated by descriptions
of functional capabilities leading to solutions that reect the capabili-
ties of the software at hand but do not solve the business problem. (A
detailed description of this problem and a remedy that involves the
application of systems thinking can be found in Lost in Translation,
published by Evolved Technologist Press.)
Agile development methodologies are one of the responses to the
failings of the waterfall methods. Agile development methods includ-
ing eXtreme Programming, Scrum, the Unied Process, and others
take the point of view that requirements are inherently unreliable.
Instead of attempting to create requirements for a large system, agile
methods seek to implement the smallest possible system that is useful
and get it in the hands of users. Then a tight feedback loop between
the users and developers allows the true requirements to emerge. The
eXtreme Programming methodology, for example, suggests that those
using the system and developers be sitting in the same room so that
they can communicate directly. When this is not possible, sometimes a
representative from the user community is situated with the develop-
ers so the feedback can be given rapidly.
In agile methods, development of a large system is done as a series
of iterations in which functionality is gradually added. Each iteration
adjusts the system based on user feedback, sort of like steering a car. In
Change versus
Workaround/
Reusability
Users, sponsors, and
business community
provide input about
whether to create
a solution or use a
workaround. A change
or workaround could
be based on existing
software such as ERP and
Microsoft Ofce with
some manual effort.
Assessing costs and
benets and suggesting
a way forward. Working
on strategy to dene a
long-term approach.
Solution Design Designing a system that
supports a business
process and the people
playing roles in that
process with information
and automation.
Designing for exibility,
avoiding over automation,
and serving the needs
of the business process
rather than letting
technical considerations
have too much impact.
User-Centric
Design
Designing a solution
from the users
perspective, not a system
perspective.
Discovering actual user
needs versus making
assumptions. Dening
the right level of user to
center on.
Creating Technical
Specications
The requirements for
a solution must be
specied in technical
terms so that the
solution can be
implemented.
Creating a specication
that is detailed enough so
that the solution created
will meet the business
requirements.
Solution Modeling
and Simulation
One method of
designing solutions is
to create models of the
processes or to simulate
the user interfaces
in order to conrm
that the design of the
solution will meet the
requirements.
Making sure modeling
and simulation dont take
up too much time and
actually reect the design
of the solution. Making
sure the feedback gained
is used to improve the
design.
Business Scenarios
and Functional
Simulation Testing
Documenting and
describing business
scenarios and functional
simulations.
Making sure that the
scenarios and simulations
accurately represent the
end state of the solution.
The table continues on page 24
some methods, like the Rational Unied Process, the interactions are
focused on building the core parts of the system and conrming the
requirements. Once that is done, a much larger effort takes place that is
similar to the waterfall methods but that is based on requirements that
have been vetted.
While agile methods are still controversial in some quarters,
leading Internet companies like Google, Amazon, Yahoo, and others
have shown that this method can work at scale. All of these companies
have launched large software efforts in beta versions that are not yet
nished and then used the experience gained in the market to improve
the products. However, as is true for the business process expert role
itself, if such a methodology is not incorporated companywide and
sponsored and promoted at the corporate level, early indicators have
shown that it is likely to fail.
User-Driven Innovation
Eric von Hippel, a professor at MIT, has become world famous
because of his research ndings that show the value of user-driven
innovation. In two books, Sources of Innovation and Democratizing
Innovation, von Hippel has analyzed how innovation takes place and
demonstrated that when people who use products are given the means
of production, they often create superior versions of those products
that meet their needs far better than designs created by intermediaries.
Von Hippel has shown that this effect holds true in a wide variety of
industries and contexts.
Part of von Hippels analysis points out that one of the reasons that
user-driven innovation is so powerful is that it obviates the need to
extract requirements from the minds of users into a form that can be
understood by product designers. This translation process is seldom
accurate. Von Hippel calls the users knowledge of their requirements
sticky because it is not easily extracted.
True user-driven innovation is limited to the scope of activities
where the users of the products actually can develop new prototypes.
In many situations, the means of design and production are too com-
plicated for direct use by users. The success of user-driven innovation,
Software
Conguration
Most mature
software systems
have complicated
conguration
mechanisms that control
their behavior and tailor
functionality to meet
different needs.
Software conguration
is often a complicated
undertaking performed
by experts.
Application/
Change Testing
Preparing test plans
and testing to ensure
that a solution meets
interaction goals and
required objectives.
Ensuring adequate time
for testing given tight
schedules. Allowing time
for user testing.
Creating Training
Materials
Training materials are
needed to explain to
users how the solution
works and how they will
interact with it to do
their jobs.
Creating training
materials that explain the
context for the solution,
not just step-by-step
instructions.
Training Users
in Development
Tools
Increasingly, users
are able to congure
software to meet their
own needs, much
like they have done
with spreadsheets for
decades. Training is
required in these new
methods.
Providing access to the
new development tools
and monitoring the user-
created solutions to make
sure they meet standards
for security and reliability
and, if needed, scalability.
Training Users in
Business Processes
and Solutions
Once training materials
have been created,
users need to spend
time learning the new
solutions.
Motivating users to
attend training. Making
training sessions effective.
Gathering User
Feedback
Once a solution is in
place, user comments
should be harvested as
part of the process of
improving the system.
Understanding what
users really need, based
on their comments
about a solution, can be
challenging.
however, has left many companies wondering how they can make this
technique work for them. This remains a considerable challenge facing
most organizations today.
Tacit Interactions
The rst wave of enterprise software automated the processes
that were common across most businesses. Then, processes that were
common across companies in an industry were automated. For 30
years, with SAP and later Oracle leading the way, enterprise software
started with nancial, accounting, and control processes, which
became known as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), then branched
out to Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain
Management (SCM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Human
Capital Management (HCM), and Supplier Relationship Management
(SRM). This collection of software grows every year with Governance,
Risk, and Compliance (GRC) and Enterprise Performance Management
(EPM) being the latest additions. Common functions, such as data
warehousing and tools for integration, have been added. Standards for
common business processes have been created. The result is todays
world in which consumers and businesses buy millions of products
every day without the knowledge that their transactions are eventually
recorded and processed using SAPs ERP system.
What has been recognized in the past few years, however, is that
the automation of ERP and the other sorts of enterprise software is only
one part of the way that most people work. Most existing software sup-
ports transformational processes (those that change a physical good
into something else) and transactional processes (those that follow a
set of rules in a predictable or predetermined fashion). A new class of
work called tacit interactions has been identied as key to produc-
tivity.
1
Tacit interactions are ad hoc tasks in which a knowledge worker
pulls together information from many sources and then uses analytical
tools or other methods to perform a task. Tacit interactions are complex
combinations of judgment, problem-solving, and communication that
1 See Competitive Advantage from Better Interactions by Scott C.
Beardsley, Bradford C. Johnson, and James M. Manyika, McKinsey Quarterly,
2006, Number 2 for more information on tacit interactions.
occur among spontaneously assembled groups and that happen differ-
ently each time.
Because of their ad hoc nature, tacit interactions are not predict-
able or automatable in the same way that enterprise processes are,
but that does not mean that they cannot be supported or enabled by
software. The trend toward service-oriented architecture has unlocked
the information inside of enterprise applications, making it more
readily available for use in tacit interactions and helping bridge the
gap between end-user applications like spreadsheets and enterprise
applications like ERP. The rise of Enterprise 2.0 collaboration (blogs,
wikis, social networking, search, linking, and others) and mashups has
also increased support for tacit interactions for those who understand
how to use and congure those tools. Adding support for tacit interac-
tions as solutions evolve will be a major challenge for business process
experts for many years to come.
Enterprise 2.0 and Collaboration
The rise of user-created content and mass collaboration, using the
power of the crowd, was dubbed Web 2.0 by OReilly Media, a leading
technology publisher and event organizer. While investing momentum
slowed down after the dot.com bust in 2000, the collective action of
millions of people in the consumer space just kept on going, resulting
in breakthroughs in many different areas. Blogs open the door for indi-
viduals to publish their opinions and glimpses of their lives to the entire
world. Wikis are the basis of Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia in the
world, based on informal collaboration among a group of hundreds of
thousands of contributors. Social networking sites like Facebook and
MySpace allow people to record their social connections so that appli-
cations can report to others in their network on what people are doing.
Applications also make use of those connections to share information
and recommendations inside a personal network or do other useful
things. Texting, instant messaging, and other wireless applications
make all of these interactions mobile and real time. YouTube opened
the door to mass distribution of user-created video. In addition, the
development of services such as search, email, calendaring, document
creation, document sharing, and networked storage are all increasingly
available and reliable.
The consumer space authoritatively took the ball of innovation in
computing. People in corporations were left wondering why their com-
puting environments at work were so much more limited than what
they could do as consumers on the Internet. What happened next is a
phenomenon known as shadow IT. Just as personal computers and web
sites inltrated the enterprise by users working outside of the control of
IT departments, blogs, wikis, and other parts of the collaborative dial
tone became often adopted in the same way. People used technologies
on the Internet, in the shadows as it were, to meet their needs. It didnt
take long for IT departments to catch on and to start formally introduc-
ing Web 2.0 technologies into the enterprise. Harvard Business School
professor Andrew McAfee dubbed corporate use of Web 2.0-style col-
laboration Enterprise 2.0.
The result of the rise of Enterprise 2.0 is that a new set of capa-
bilities are introduced to a population of end-users who vary widely in
their ability to accept them and make use of them. These capabilities
in many cases are proving ideal for supporting tacit interactions and
ad hoc collaboration of the sort that previously only occurred through
long trails of emails. At many companies, younger workers seem to
adopt and make use of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities much faster than
older workers.
Widgets, Mashups, BPM, and SOA
Part of the revolution of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 is a phenom-
enon that OReilly Media called innovation in assembly. This inno-
vation is fueled by web services that provide access to public services
like Google Maps as well as data and functionality from ERP and other
internal enterprise systems as well. The browser has become a much
more powerful user interface and application development platform
due to the emergence of technology platforms such as Ajax, which
allow browser-based interfaces to access data from many web services
and process that data.
Environments are emerging that allow users to assemble new
combinations of information and applications for themselves. Yahoo!,
Google, Microsoft, Apple, Nokia, and others have widget frameworks in
which chunks of information and functionality can be assembled on
pages by users as needed. Simplied environments are emerging for
creating mashup applications, another name for composite applica-
tions assembled from a variety of services. More complicated mashups
can be assembled through the use of Business Process Management
environments that provide mechanisms for visually describing busi-
ness processes.
All of this innovation in assembly opens the door for users to create
interfaces that have the information they want and applications that
meet their needs. But, again, this is only possible if users can master the
tools used to create such applications. Younger and more technically
savvy users have been leading the way.
Stafng the Gaps: The Business Process Expert Role in
Creating Solutions
So, looking back on the nature of solution creation and the trends
shaping the modern computing environment, we can make several
observations:
All of the challenges related to solution creation that have been
with us, and will be with us forever, must be addressed on a day-to-
day basis. Activities such as governance, project portfolio analysis,
training, communicating effectively, and organizational change
management must be performed to a high standard to ensure
success.
Even when guided by the business process perspective, communica-
tion between the business side about their needs and technologists
who create solutions has been discovered to be incredibly difcult.
Agile methods make the assumption that such communication is
almost impossible and experimentation through iterative develop-
ment must be used to determine accurate requirements. Likewise,
the research into user-driven innovation shows that information
about user requirements is sticky and hard to translate into a form
technologists can use to build solutions.
User-driven innovation is on the rise as more and more capabilities
are provided for people to craft their own solutions through means
such as Enterprise 2.0 and mashups. But, at the present time, many
of these mechanisms are too difcult for all but a small number of
people to use. Furthermore, this fast increase in smaller shadow
solutions could possibly create a counterproductive effect for the
end-to-end business process.
Support for tacit interactions is improving and Enterprise 2.0-style
collaboration is on the uptake by certain groups of users in the
enterprise. Web services are allowing corporate information to
be brought into the mix, but the nature of the required dial tone
needed to promote collaboration in the enterprise is still forming.
The nature of the IT department is changing. In addition to build-
ing large systems that automate the operations of the enterprise,
IT departments are now in the business of observing what users
are doing for themselves and promoting proper standards when an
ad hoc solution becomes popular. IT departments also seem to be
moving gradually to a greater business understanding as the busi-
ness organization becomes more at ease with IT savvy.
So, adding all of this together, it is clear that IT has left the shore
of past practices and is on a journey to a new land in which users will
do more for themselves, in which a mature and robust collaborative
dial tone for Enterprise 2.0 will be available to people who know how to
use it to support tacit interactions, and in which the difculty of com-
munication will be acknowledged and appropriate efforts will be made
to overcome that difculty.
But, it is not at all clear how long this journey will take. And no busi-
ness can afford to wait around and use past practices in the meantime.
Urgent questions must be answered during the journey:
How can the business process perspective guide the solution cre-
ation process and make it more effective?
How can maximum progress be made while the world of IT is learn-
ing to use these new tools and to adapt to new practices?
How can companies do a better job of addressing the traditional
challenges of solution creation?
How can learning and solution adoption be accelerated?
Who is responsible for debugging the process of solution creation
at your organization?
There is an answer to these questions. It is a person with special
skills, most prominently a sophisticated form of empathy and an
understanding of the business process perspective, further described
in Chapter 3.
31
N
ow that that we have described some of the major challenges of
solution creation, we can add to our denition of the business
process expert.
The role of the business process expert in supporting solution cre-
ation can most simply and accurately be dened as a person with the
ability to quickly understand business needs and translate that under-
standing into a form that leads to the creation of better solutions.
Sometimes that understanding is translated into better require-
ments documents
Sometimes it is translated into user-created solutions
Sometimes it becomes suggestions for the way to use collaboration
to help a project
Sometimes it becomes innovation in new processes
Sometimes it becomes confict resolution
Sometimes it becomes education and training
But in all cases, the business process expert is someone who has
a special skill, that of being able to deeply understand the needs of
the business and then to crystallize that understanding in a way that
3
Completing the Denition of the Business
Process Expert Role
empowers others, reduces risk, and increases the quality of solutions.
In many cases, we believe that the business process expert is the hybrid
evolution of what used to be called a business analyst, a solution con-
sultant, and an application consultant. Many business process experts
will report to someone called a business process architect, who is in
turn yet another level of business process expert.
From the Wiki: A Denition of Business Process Expert
An anonymous user on the BPX wiki provided this denition: The
business process expert can most simply and accurately be dened as
a person with the ability to quickly understand business needs and
translate that understanding into a form that leads to the creation/
composition of better solutions.
What the business process expert does when supporting solution
creation is to staff the gaps that exist between the current capabilities
of people and technology that stand in the way of achieving the vision
of exible, responsive IT that many observers see on the horizon.
Depending on the size, needs, process maturity, use of standards,
and technological architecture of the organization and its industry,
the business process experts responsibilities will vary to one degree
or the other. For instance, it may be that the business process expert
works to optimize existing processes or, instead, to innovate entirely
new processes. If the business process expert is at a large industrial
company, the focus may be more on improving existing processes. At
growing companies that are still working out their business models,
business process experts may push the envelope of possibilities by cre-
ating entirely new processes. At most rms, the role of business process
expert as innovator will grow organically as the benets of accelerated
business process innovation are recognized. Regardless of the size of
the organization, to be effective, a business process expert must be a
polymath and possess a host of talents. For example, most business
process experts have a deep understanding of a broad range of existing
business processes, software applications, UIs, and architectural para-
digms such as SOA. Business process experts may excel at working with
tools for collaboration, business process modeling, or visual applica-
Chapter 3: Completing the Denition of the Business Process Expert Role 33
tion development. Most especially, the business process expert needs
proven experience in a variety of practical business settings.
Types of Business Process Experts and the Skills They Employ
In the past, duties of the business process expert with respect to
solution creation were performed in part by multiple roles, including
business analysts, business architects, business consultants, imple-
mentation consultants, IT managers, and enterprise architects, to
name just a few. Today, the well-rounded business process expert can
be expected to possess the ability and talent of any number of the afore-
mentioned roles and thus avoid some of the pitfalls they encountered
working in isolation from one another.
From the Wiki: The Business Process Expert Role as a
Hybrid
According to Bob Austin of Atos Origin UK, the business process
expert role is a hybrid of:
Business analyst, concerned with gathering business
requirements
Business process modeler, concerned with developing process
models using tool such as ARIS, SAP Solution Manager, and SAP
NetWeaver Visual Composer
Application consultant, concerned with mapping business pro-
cesses with applications
The business process expert will also typically develop business
process-based metrics, analytics, and dashboards.
The sophisticated empathy that we suggest is the foundation of the
business process experts ability to help create better solutions may
be applied in many different ways. Our research has shown that each
successful business process expert we have encountered has a certain
talent for empathy and combines that talent with other skills as needed.
Each business process expert nds a way to make a difference based on
his or her unique skills.
While there are no hard and fast rules, our research has identied
ve general categories of business process expert beyond the advocate
for the business process perspective that illustrate different ways that
empathy creates value:
Business process expert as Organizational Change Manager and
Therapist
Business process expert as Requirements and Process Analyst
Business process expert as Solution Designer
Business process expert as Empowerment Coach
Business process expert as Innovator
Each of these ve types of business process experts uses the ability
for empathy and rapid understanding to apply different skills in differ-
ent areas of the solution creation process.
Business Process Expert as Organizational Therapist
Organizational and communication problems are at the root of
many failures to properly create IT solutions. When the business process
expert acts as an organizational therapist, she frequently arrives when
progress has reached a standstill and both the business and technology
staff involved realize they need help getting unstuck.
It is no coincidence that, time and again, both business and IT pro-
fessionals, along with business process experts themselves, describe
human dynamics as being the single most difcult obstacle that orga-
nizations encounter when striving to improve.
Helen Sunderland, a pioneer business process expert who has been
involved in many of the early discussions of the nature of the business
process expert role, frequently talks of the way she helicopters in to
help solve problems. The metaphor is an apt one because it includes
the idea of arriving with a view from above to solve an urgent problem,
perhaps a crisis.
Without exception, every business process expert and related pro-
fessional we talked to while putting this book together testied that the
greatest challenge to success in creating new solutions and optimizing
business processes is change management. Why? Richard Hirsch, a
business process expert whose areas of expertise include knowledge
management, portal integration, and others says, People have the
tendency to resist changing their current workow unless the benet
of change is made obvious. (We will delve more deeply into this issue
in Chapter 5 on organizational change management and the business
process expert.) Regardless of the situation or the players, business
process experts need deft hands, keen eyes, and sensitive ears if they
intend to win the clients condence. A mastery of the following soft
skills is key to delivering the help that organizations need to become
more effective.
Skill: Communication
Helen Sunderland has noted in her blogs on the SAP Business Process
Expert community (BPX community for short) that nearly 60% of her
time with clients is spent engaged in varying levels of communication
efforts. Clear and honest communication, she says, is key between a
business process expert and any client, but particularly essential in a
short-term assignment which results in ultimately inuencing business
change. . . . Your ability to communicate clearly in a manner appropri-
ate to your listeners is essential to your success. . . . You may consider
yourself a guru in your area of specialty, but no amount of sage wisdom
will sufce to make up for your lack of ability to communicate well with
multiple audiences. Claiming too much expertise could actually turn
people off and make them feel that the business process expert is not
listening but instead trying to take control.
Whether business process experts are working in house or have
been hired as outside consultants, from an organizations perspective,
they are expected to assume the role of a trusted advisor, Sunderland
says. Business process experts are sophisticated professionals whose
success at any given assignment depends not only on their business and
IT skills, but, just as importantly, on the means by which they convey
their credibility and authority to the people with whom they work. No
matter how brilliant and creative the business process expert, without
the ability to garner a clients trust, he will not be able to overcome the
clients reluctance to move forward with the new ideas and information
the business process expert is there to provide. Usually one or more
members of an organization will be familiar with the business process
experts background. Be that as it may, however, such knowledge will
never preclude the necessity to establish and nurture personal, face-
to-face relationships as a means of increasing the productivity of every
interaction.
Here is a tried and true method for establishing trust and cred-
ibility: after briey outlining their history and concentrating on past
experiences in positions as a trusted advisor, business process
experts should always exhibit openness and candor, clarifying for the
client that there are no secret agendas and that they are the number
one priority.
Since communication consists of the exchange of information
between individuals, the business process experts ability to listen is
just as important as the ability to speak and write well. After they have
established some initial credibility with their audience, it is incumbent
upon business process experts to ask a number of specically directed
questions and then to listen with great attentiveness while the client
responds. The client may be brand new, or the business process expert
may have already established a good working relationship. In either
case, with each new assignment, it is important that business process
experts behave as if they know nothing about the client and their
needs. Remember, the business process experts objective is to sort out
the critical issues from the noise that surrounds them. Remaining
simultaneously objective and fully engaged is the quickest way to see
through to the core issues, formulate the big picture (a holistic view
that includes the organizations culture, political landscape, business,
and IT practices), and ultimately, devise recommendations for optimal
solutions.
An alert ear goes a long way in this regard, as does nely honed
intuition. While clients may well be explicit in their difculties, needs,
concerns, anxieties, and fears, it is often the case that many of their most
crucial issues will remain cloaked, revealed, if at all, between the lines
or through various hints. When this is the case, the business process
expert can ask further questions for clarity and tease out further infor-
mation. While on the surface it may appear that a clients circumstances
have nothing to do with the business process experts own experience,
frequently they are similar at heart. According to Sunderland, a bona
de technique for business process experts to quickly understand their
clients environment and issues is to listen for similarities to their own
experiences.
The audience with whom business process experts must com-
municate includes a host of players, from engineers and programmers
in IT, to HR and quality control managers, and, nallyand most
importantlyto various stakeholders and members across the C
suite, without whose ardent sponsorship meaningful growth would be
impossible. When communication between business and IT is success-
ful, a creative energy ow develops that produces value for both the
organization and its customers.
Political, cultural, and business matters are more likely to arise
organically at rst than are technical matters. For business process
experts to avoid unwanted surprises, such as a discovery near the
ostensible completion of a project that a key standalone application
was hiding beyond the main systems landscape, they must ask every
question they can to ensure that that they have identied all of the non-
conforming systems, along with the principle members of the cast.
Once business process experts have grasped the big picture, trouble-
shot the problems, and formulated suggestions for improvement, they
must deliver their conclusions in crisp, concise language that is catered
to the client at hand. For instance, Sunderland suggests that if nance
is the audience, business process experts will best succeed by giving
them a no-nonsense message that articulates the desired cost benets.
If, on the other hand, the message is directed toward members of the
C suite, it ought to be delivered in unambiguous business language. If
the audience is a technical or conguration team, it is essential that the
message express all solutions and congurations using technological
language and jargon.
Skill: Facilitation and Mediation
Traditionally, a cultural and ideological gulf has separated profes-
sionals of the business and technological sectors. In many organiza-
tions, an environment exists where businesspeople look upon tech-
nologists as mere tools for building greater capital while technologists
scorn the businesspeople for their indifference to anything that doesnt
affect the bottom line.
As this book will repeatedly emphasize, the business process
experts ability to coexist in both the worlds of business and technol-
ogy is a strength that organizations would do well to employ by way
of transforming what is a potentially toxic dynamic into a culture of
collaboration that benets both sides of the equation and, in the end,
the business itself.
When business process experts enter any new situation, among
the many roles they may assume is that of a mediator between two or
more parties holding potentially different viewpoints and concerns
with the intention of facilitating improved relations between them. To
gain a clear picture of a companys existing culture, business process
experts can start by asking a number of questions. What, for example,
is businesss current relationship with IT? What is their level of process
maturity? Is there any animosity, rivalry, or competition? If so, what are
the various possible solutions for alleviating the tension or purging it
entirely? From a business point of view, what would be the ideal role of
the IT department? What would business like IT to do for them today?
On the ip side, how does IT perceive business, and how can business
best serve IT?
The empathy that we have described as being paramount to the
business process experts success is crucial in such a context. The goal is
to remain objective enough to avoid taking sides while simultaneously
understanding and identifying with the pain points of all concerned
parties. Business process experts must be able to tell each individual or
group that they hear their frustration, anger, anxiety, and fear, and then
explain why and how these problems cannot do anything but obstruct
growth for the company and for the individuals that run it. It is critical
that patterns of blame be identied and rooted out. It is just as critical,
too, to avoid concentrating on IT as the source of every problem.
Once they have located the sources of the companys ills, business
process experts must then communicate ways to transform existing
patterns and processes in ways that are both healthy and acceptable to
all concerned, working with any unavoidable constraints, such as lack
of funds, time, and space.
Conversely, as the old saying goes, business process experts should
never try to x what is not broken. It is vital that business process
experts recognize and continue to use those aspects of a company that
are perfectly functional. Clearly, the organization does many things
well. Otherwise, it would not be in business. The key is to refrain from
changing for the sake of change and to isolate those components that
are inefcient or broken from those that are working well.
Skill: Change Management
Change management involves the process of actually transform-
ing an organization once the direction has been set. Business process
experts frequently ll gaps that exist in the design and execution of
transformation efforts. This can involve anything from aiding in busi-
ness case development, to helping create a strategy for performing the
transformation, to explaining the roles that everyone will play in a
transformation, to helping with troubleshooting during project execu-
tion. Frequently during this stage, business process experts recruit
people who are involved in the project that they have identied as being
effective agents of change.
From the Wiki: A Change Management Dialog
The BPX wiki includes a project that involves a pilot for a ctional
company, Big Machines Corp. This project helps business process
experts understand the types of interactions they may encounter,
as illustrated through scripts. The page on change management, by
Owen Pettiford, Richard Hirsch, and Hans Butenschn, is especially
relevant to this discussion. See https://wiki.sdn.sap.com:443/wiki/
display/BPX/The+role+of+Change+Management.
In applying all of these soft skills, the business process expert does
what many therapists see as their core mission: Bringing problems and
negative patterns to light so that an enlightened awareness of the big
picture is created. In this way, the healthy parts of the organization are
expanded and brought to bear to help heal unhealthy parts. Business
process experts generally nd that the role of organizational therapist
can pay large dividends as more and more people are brought to a
deeper understanding of the goals that an organization is attempting
to pursue. This approach especially bears fruit in organizations that
have divisional silos.
Business Process Expert as Requirements and Business Process
Analyst
Programs of change and transformation need specic targets.
Business process experts play a crucial role in solving problems inher-
ent in gathering requirements and designing processes, as well as in
a necessary precursor to that step: evaluating strategy and building
the business case related to those requirements. In a perfect world
in which user-driven innovation is easier, the challenges associated
with requirements gathering would be less onerous. Indeed, gathering
requirements for many solutions would be unnecessary because users
could create what they needed for themselves. Processes would be
modeled in such a way that they could be easily adjusted and optimized
on the y. But we are not there yet and, even in such a world, some solu-
tions will be too large or too broad to be created by users without the
help of technology professionals. Challenges of requirements gathering
and process design will always be with us in some form. Right now, in
most organizations, gathering requirements and designing effective
business processes to meet them remain intractable problems that
business process experts are stepping in to solve.
Requirements Gathering
Requirements are essentially lists of things that a system should
and should not do. The challenge in most requirements processes is
that it is hard to nd the right level of detail. Requirements that are too
broad could be satised in many ways, some of which may not achieve
the business goals. Requirements that are too specic mean that the
technologists role of nding the best way to meet the requirements
with available technology is limited. Ideally, requirements explain the
goals that users are seeking to achieve, as well as various boundaries on
an acceptable solution.
In most cases, requirements are gathered in some sort of document
that explains the business goals for a solution, which features or func-
tions are absolutely needed, and which would be nice to have. In the
best case, requirements documents extract the sticky knowledge, as
described in Chapter 2, from users about how they do their jobs and
what they need to do them better.
Unfortunately, for reasons that are presented in detail in the book
Lost in Translation (Evolved Technologist Press, 2007), analysis of
requirements for solutions frequently is dominated by IT consider-
ations. Because technologists are so comfortable with abstractions and
complexity and are also, in general, enthusiastic about the develop-
ment tools and software applications they use, discussions of detailed
business requirements are frequently dominated by information about
the relative merits of functionality. The how crowds out the what.
Lost in Translation provides a concrete way to implement the business
process perspective by focusing on ve aspects of an information
systemthe values, policies, events, content, and trust relationships
(VPEC-T). Through these dimensions, the business users can express
the personality of the system they want created to help the business.
While few business process experts have codied the way their
empathy works to extract sticky knowledge and translate it into a
comprehensive document, almost every business process expert we
talked to reported that representing users in the requirements process
was one of the key ways they added value. It is important to remember
that any requirements document will fall short of answering all the
questions that technologists have when building a solution. One of the
reasons that the VPEC-T approach works is that the principles of the
information system at the foundation of a solution are described so
that technologists have detailed guidance about designing a solution
that will work. Business process experts tend to be involved throughout
solution creation, answering questions and providing guidance all
through the process so that the needs of the users are well represented
and the what of the solution is not overcome by the how of the
technology.
From the Wiki: The Value of Prototypes
You can shorten the requirements gathering phase by making
good use of prototypes. Furthermore, prototypes allow the user
to validate what is being created at an early stage. In essence, the
business process expert can ask the user, Is this what you need?
and the user can conrm the way forward, speeding development
cycles and preventing requirements from being lost in translation in
many cases.
BPM and Top-down Process Design and Modeling
Almost all IT solutions are created to serve the needs of a business
process. Sometimes those business processes are precisely dened in
a step-by-step manner. Other times they are looser, more collaborative
processes that have end and beginning states but not a lot of detail about
how the work in between will be performed. Business process experts
report that one of the key ways they accelerate the creation of solutions
and improve their quality is through exercising their skills and good
taste in designing business processes that often cross organizational
boundaries. Frequently, business process experts add the most value
when a company is starting over and designing or redesigning the way
they do things from the top down, as recommended by the business
process perspective. Business process experts may take this opportu-
nity to start to introduce some of the relevant ndings from Business
Process Management (BPM) research and best practices.
David Frankel is an expert in Model Driven Architecture. When
asked what he perceived to be the business process experts critical
skill set, he said, A solid understanding of the companys business pro-
cesses, good judgment in distinguishing automatable processes versus
tacit interactions, an ability to identify existing IT components available
to support business processes, and an ability to dene requirements
for new IT components where they are needed. The [business process
expert] must also have the ability and mindset to model business pro-
cesses precisely and should be familiar with the ideas behind model-
driven software development. The [business process expert] must have
the ability to communicate effectively with and understand the point
of view of business people and IT people.
To design and automate a business process requires an understand-
ing of its denition, the business goals that an organization wants to
achieve, and how available technology can provide the solution. Marilyn
Pratt, a leading business process expert evangelist and blogger for the
SAP BPX community, denes a business process as a set of activities
transforming a dened business input into a dened business result.
A business process step, on the other hand, is a task or an interaction
performed by a process component either with or without human
interaction and together with other steps form a business process.
As for a business application, it is a collection of business processes
required to address specic business needs, implemented via a set
of application and software components running on a platform. A
good example of this is SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP
CRM). Finally, a business process platform is the combination of SAPs
Application Platform with SAPs technology platform; it supports the
creation, enhancement, and seamless execution of business processes
and business scenarios.
Yvonne Antonucci, Associate Professor in the Department of MIS
and Decision Sciences at Widener University, suggests, in her BPX
community blog, that adopting a BPM approach can yield a variety
of benets when designing processes. First, Antonucci says, after
organizations recognize that BPM must focus on a holistic view of
process management . . . [they] should focus on the goal of integrating
management, organizational issues, people, process, compliance, and
technology for both operational and strategic activities with resulting
business processes that produce value, serve customers, and generate
income. These strategic activities encompass analytical and predictive
methods with technologies in an effort to create agile organizations.
While well-dened and automated processes can be successful accom-
plishments for organizations, sustained success lies in the ability to
create value through effectively managing and orchestrating these
processes across the organization.
Second, noting that a comprehensive skill set is clearly required
to create a successful BPM program, Antonucci echoes our former
suggestion that an examination and denition of the BPM practice is
required.
According to her investigations, the general lifecycle of an organi-
zations BPM program begins with process planning and strategy that
people use to direct the analysis, design, and modeling of business
processes. In turn, these models form the basis of the conguration,
implementation, and execution of the processes themselves. Once the
processes are in place, they must be monitored and controlled. The
ensuing data is then analyzed again, and the results used to rene the
processes still further. These steps provide the basis for a feedback loop
in which the analysis, design, modeling, conguration, implementa-
tion, and execution of processes are continuously improved upon.
While many companies are in fact establishing basic BPM pro-
grams, what they generally lack, Antonucci says, are the management
practices of key success factors that must also be integrated in order to
encompass both the business and IT aspects of BPM. These success
factors include strong executive as well as divisional process sponsor-
ship, clearly identied process owners, employee incentives for process
improvement, and proven change management, among others. As
we noted earlier, until business process experts arrived on the scene,
these success factors accrued only slowly, over time, and were focused
on either IT or on business, but rarely on both. And, since they were
not typically integrated, they were usually inconsistent. To guarantee
success, business process experts must be deployed with the skills that
integrate process and management practices for processes that run
across an organizations entire ecosystem.
This assessment of the current state of BPM is the foundation upon
which the business process experts comprehensive skill set can best
be dened and improved. For now, it entails a variety of hard and soft
skills, including a holistic understanding of business and technology;
strong SOA, business process, and application skills; and knowledge of
both formal modeling and do-it-yourself (DIY) tools.
In other words, the design of business processes is no longer just a
matter of setting down the goals, the beginning and end state, and a list
of tasks to be performed. Business Process Management has become
a discipline that can be used to better organize the entire scope of
activities of a company. Business process experts act as a force that
brings order, one solution at a time, by sorting activities into differ-
ent categories and dening the boundaries between automation and
human activity.
From the Wiki: Business Process Modeling with BPMN
Why is business process modeling important and what do you
need to know? If you googled that question, you would likely nd
references to courses by Dr. Bruce Silver, a leading independent BPM
industry analyst. Dr. Silver has provided the BPX community with
some exclusive content: a 6-part series on business process modeling
with BPMN. This vital series is available both in eLearning (https://
wiki.sdn.sap.com:443/wiki/x/2_E) and article (https://wiki.sdn.sap.
com:443/wiki/x/NwAB) formats.
Tacit Interactions, Bottom up Refactoring, and Optimization
In addition to the top-down design of business processes, busi-
ness process experts play a bottom-up role that amounts to battleeld
management. When in the process of helping smaller projects and
troubleshooting, business process experts frequently nd ways to
improve the efciency or execution of business processes through
small adjustments.
One way that business process experts achieve results from incre-
mental changes is when they recognize a situation in which a tacit
interaction can be more effectively supported.
David Frankel points out that certain aspects of business processes
are transactional, repetitive, and fully automatable. Other aspects
are not. In many situations, knowledge workers use unique tools to
negotiate, collaborate, and then exercise on the ground judgment after
synthesizing information. In a tacit interaction, knowledge workers
pull information from a number of sources and try to think about it
and make a decision.
Tacit interactions include coordination, monitoring, negotiating,
identifying new markets and value propositions, and the like. The
percentage of employee activities that constitute tacit interactions is
increasing across the board in all industries and has reached as high as
60 to 70 percent in the nancial and healthcare sectors.
1
Here are some examples of tacit interactions:
Pulling together information to decide what companies to partner
with on a strategic initiative
Coordinating product development, feld support, and partners
Negotiating an OEM deal
Such tasks cannot be automated because they arent sufciently
regimented.
In the world of Enterprise 2.0, business process experts frequently
are able to suggest ways of using collaborative tools such as blogs,
wikis, and mashupsespecially those that use web services to access
information and functionality in enterprise applicationsto more
effectively support tacit interactions. In such cases, the tacit interac-
tion moves from completely informal mechanisms, such as email and
spreadsheets, to one with just a bit more structure in a shareable space,
which now allows others to join in the process and creates a reusable
repository of knowledge.
Business process experts also frequently suggest incremental
changes in processes that allow unused parts of enterprise applications
to be brought to bear on processes that were taking place with insuf-
cient information. Incremental changes to the design of processes
can also remove roadblocks and increase efciency. But to perform
such changes condently and effectively requires a broad perspective,
something that business process experts consciously cultivate.
1 See Competitive Advantage from Better Interactions by Scott C.
Beardsley, Bradford C. Johnson, and James M. Manyika, McKinsey Quarterly,
2006, Number 2 for more information on tacit interactions.
Business Process Expert as Solution Designer
While we have so far emphasized the soft and fuzzy, empathetic,
business process nature of the business process expert, it is important
to realize that they are down and dirty technologists as well. Like all
technologists, they tend to love details and complexity. A big part of
the impact of the business process expert role has come from the way
these folks bring this detailed knowledge to the table during solution
creation.
The business process experts we have spoken to report that they
apply detailed knowledge about the following areas as they do their
jobs:
User-focused process design and modeling
Application capabilities and boundaries
Application confguration
SOA, mashups, and integration
User-Focused Process Design and Modeling
Earlier, we described how business process experts play the role
of requirements analysts and process designers. In this role, business
process experts look at both the big picture from the top-down and at
how processes can be improved incrementally from the bottom up.
There is another level that business process experts operate on that
overlaps with the process design skills already described. Business
process experts are quick studies and have a large amount of knowledge
from the user perspective. In the design and analysis role, business
process experts act as advisors and representatives of those involved
in managing and overseeing the process, but in the role we are about to
describe, business process experts act as counselors and advocates for
the users who are executing the processes. In this regard, the business
process experts are superusers who not only see the big picture but
who are also conversant with all of the knobs and dials that are used
to carry out the work. The main overlap with the process design role
is the gray area between suggesting an incremental improvement in a
process and suggesting a change to user interface that may fall short of
being considered a change to a process.
The main work done by business process experts is to again apply
empathy, but this time by sitting in the chair of the workers who are
making the process happen. All too often, solutions are imposed on
workers who are not involved in the process of describing the solution.
One of the reasons that agile development methods work is that they
increase the information ow from users during the solution creation
process. In addition to helping to advocate for users, business process
experts often perform the role of facilitating user acceptance testing
during the rollout process.
Much of the time, business process experts playing the role of user
advocates are suggesting ways of improving user interfaces or adding
new screens that offer relevant contextual information to improve
decision making. But as more development is model-driven, business
process experts are often the ones who convert an existing applica-
tion to a model-driven form. Solutions based on this sort of modeling
usually pave the way for user-driven innovation down the road. But the
rst step, that of creating the model-driven application from scratch, is
something that usually must be done by a superuser.
David Frankel sees a convergence in the future between the model-
ing used at high levels to describe business processes and that done at
the level of application creation for model-driven development. Those
of us who are pushing model-driven techniques in software develop-
ment are pushing from the bottom up to that business/IT intersection,
said Frankel. On the other hand, youve got business process manage-
ment going on. BPM is bringing automated tooling to the managing of
business processes. You are increasingly able to model processes at a
high level in a machine-readable way and have the processes execute.
BPM is moving top down toward that intersection of business and IT.
And it became clear to me that here we are, both from the bottom up
and from the top down, pushing toward this intersection and that we
are going to collide and work at cross purposes unless these commu-
nities start having a dialogue. Frankel sees business process experts
as one of the important participants in this dialogue and attempts to
bridge the gaps between these two worlds in his blogs and speaking
engagements.
Application Capabilities and Boundaries
One of the key roles business process experts play is that of applica-
tion experts, people who have a deep knowledge of both the applica-
tions capabilities and its place in the overall application portfolio. In
this capacity, they know the functionality of specic applications and
how that automation is properly applied. The key to success in the use
of vendor-created software is knowing what the software was intended
to doforcing software to do something it was not built for can be a
recipe for disaster. On the other hand, todays software frequently has
untapped capabilities used only by application experts. The business
process expert can step in to provide help in exploiting application
capabilities to their full extent.
Business process experts contextualize this expertise because they
are, by denition, experts in the business processes that a company
intends to implement. When the business process expert combines the
knowledge of what applications can do with the understanding of what
processes a business needs to implement, she can then start separat-
ing which parts of the process will be automated by a vendor-provided
application, which will be supported by collaboration tools in a tacit
interaction, and which will take place in the brains of the workers. She
can determine which parts of the process will take place in several
applications that may be working together. In this way, the business
process expert draws boundaries and carves the process into chunks
and then allocates them appropriately.
Helen Sunderland nds that her interaction starts by nding out
the set of tools that are currently in place to perform a business process.
Clients tell me they have been doing something with Excel spread-
sheets. They then ask me to help them design something that may
be a combination of Excel spreadsheets and SAP products, or all SAP
products, or all Excel, or whatever it iswe plan on cocktail napkins.
They want me to talk to them about what were doing but keep wearing
my SAP hat at the same time so that I can provide them with the best
solution.
In performing this analysis, Sunderland keeps her eye on the big
picture. We dont ever work with business process in isolation. Yes,
most of the time technology helps make the process more effective, but
sometimes there are also people issues, logistical issues, and strategy
issues that need to be addressed. One issue cant be discussed in isola-
tion. Everything needs to be discussed and understood together.
Sunderland said that drawing the boundaries and allocating parts
of the process to the right application involves combining an under-
standing of best practices with the ways that work for the company.
When this knowledge is combined with an understanding of what a
vendor product can do, the chances of success improve dramatically.
What I do is I build planning applications so that managers can
enter their expenses, so the CFO can forecast his nancial statements,
so that the sales planners can gure out their sales projections. I
build budgeting software forecasting tools, the whole gamut, said
Sunderland. And because nothings out of the boxeverybody has
some standard processes that they already use in planning. Everybody
plans their salaries; everybody plans their operating expenses in some
fashion according to their chart of accounts. However, they may not
have tools that are effective for the audience that is using them. So you
can put a very sophisticated planning tool on a managers desktop, and
perhaps hes out on the shop oor in some factory, in some no-name
town, and hes not really that computer-literate. Youve failed because
you havent presented to the end user a nal product that meets their
needs. You want a very sophisticated application on your nancial
analysts desktop, but you want something very simple and easy to use
on a casual users desktop who hardly ever logs on.
Sunderland is also careful about being too aggressive about forcing
users into best practice processes. I actually have a real issue with the
phrase best practice because I dont think there is such a thing. I think
there are leading practices, but I dont think theres a best practice.
What are the best questions you can ask so that you can then apply
your experience to those things? The business process expert role
is one thats primarily about designing business processes. You have
to stay on top of the technology in order to make sure its effectively
implemented.
From Application Conguration to Solution Composition
Once a clear understanding of which application will do which
part of a process has been established, the challenge is to make each
application do what it is supposed to. Modern software was built to be
congurable. What this means in practice is that each software product
comes with thousands of settings and conguration mechanisms that
control the behavior of all the various aspects of the software.
From the Wiki: SOA Skills
As described in the next section, on top of conguration, we have
the exibility offered by service-oriented architecture, which can in
effect decompose applications into small sets of consumable, reus-
able services. Composing, conguring, and reusing what is available
has become a critical skill in itself.
Ginger Gatling, an active member of the BPX community, sees con-
guration of applications as a separate body of knowledge that must
be mastered to make the most out of a vendor-provided application.
Conguration is complicated enough that you really need to have deep
knowledge available. And even though its not technical knowledge, its
not necessarily business process knowledge either. Its sort of applica-
tion knowledge. Its not application knowledge about what you want
the business process to do. Its more like quasi-technical application
knowledge about conguration. When we create a purchase requisi-
tion, is it going to become a purchase order immediately or does it need
approval? If it needs approval, is it going to go through workow or are
they going to go look for it? Hundreds of decisions like these need to be
made.
Gatling sees the business process expert as the legacy that should
be left behind after the expert team from systems integrators that may
have been involved in conguring the software when it was originally
installed has departed.
But if you look at this business process expert as partnering with
the business organization to really understand the processes, how
theyre supposed to work in the company, and the technology that SAP
has to extend those processes, the business process expert role will stay
in-house and could be the legacy left by system integrators.
SOA, Mashups, and Integration
The rise in availability of web services and mashups that combine
services into new applications has greatly expanded the possibilities for
tailoring functionality to meet the needs of specic knowledge workers.
A mashup, another name for a composite application, can combine
services from many different sources to provide exactly the informa-
tion and functionality needed. Services can also be the foundation for
integrating applications so that information from one application can
be synchronized with another application. In this way, for example, the
customer information gathered in a CRM application can ow into an
ERP application.
Business process experts play a key role in leading the brainstorm-
ing, design, and implementation of mashups and service-based inte-
grations. An increasing number of easy-to-use tools can help to create
mashups and congure service-based integrations. But, in order to
effectively use these tools, you have to understand how business pro-
cesses are being implemented and the role that each knowledge worker
plays in these business processes. Because business process experts
have such knowledge, they are well equipped to design mashups.
Bear in mind that mashups not only help move processes along but
also provide a pulse on processes through, for example, dashboards.
Additionally, business process experts can guide customers through
the ever-more populous landscape of new mashups that are being
developed every day.
Business Process Expert as Empowerment Coach
Business process experts nd fellow travelers everywhere they
gopeople who have a desire to help build better solutions but who
need help in focusing their efforts. One of the most commonly reported
roles in the research for this book so far is that of coach. Business
process experts teach others what they know about how to help build
solutions. While the scope of such activities is not limited to one area,
the business process experts included in our research reported that
most of the knowledge transfer and empowerment took place in the
following areas.
Requirements Gathering: Business process experts often nd
people who share their talent for empathy and have strong com-
munication skills. Once these people learn the ropes, they can
easily become business process experts themselves, especially
with regard to capturing requirements and communicating those
requirements to technologists. So far, business process experts
have reported that it seems easier to train someone with business
knowledge in technical skills to be a business process expert than
the other way around.
Modeling: The process of describing solutions at all levels using
models is gaining popularity. Frequently, the people who best
understand the business processes nd modeling tools strange and
difcult. Business process experts report that they have been able
to accelerate progress in creating a comprehensive set of process
models by training motivated business people in modeling tools.
Sometimes these modeling tools are used at high levels to model
end-to-end processes that span the enterprise. Other times, these
tools are used to model workows using mechanisms like SAP
Guided Procedures, which are commonly used to guide smaller
segments of business processes but which can be used to model
end-to-end processes as well.
Collaboration: Business process experts often know just when to
put a blog or wiki into place to make communication happen. Often,
people are timid about introducing such tools because they dont
know what will happen once information is out in the open. If an
organization has a collaborative dial tone, that is, an infrastructure
supports collaboration, business process experts can lead the way
and show people how to put that dial tone to good use.
Conguration: Conguring software is all too often considered a
black art. But for decades software vendors have been working on
making conguration as easy as possible, and in some cases they
have succeeded. Business process experts report that some busi-
ness users are ready to dive in and learn how to congure software
to meet their needs. When this happens, the door to user-driven
innovation is unlocked.
Development Tools: Frameworks for assembling user-interface
widgets, environments for creating mashups, and model-driven
visual programming tools have all removed much of the complex-
ity of developing certain types of applications. These tools, while
much easier to use than the previous generation of development
environments, still have personalities and quirks of their own and
take some getting used to. Business process experts report that with
a little training to overcome the awkwardness of these tools, some
users catch re and become leaders in creating new solutions.
Business Process Expert as Innovator
One of the privileges of being involved in so many different parts of
the organization and in the solution creation process is the opportunity
to gain a wide perspective. Business process experts tend to dive in and
become intimate with both the work of individuals and the workings
of technology. This breadth and depth often leads to ideas for new
processes and new solutions that t into the big picture in unexpected
ways. The nal role we will examine is that of the business process
expert as innovator.
The business process expert will usually play the role of innovator
in two ways: as primary innovator and as a catalyst for innovation.
In the role of primary innovator, the business process expert will
have an explicit responsibility for innovation as part of the job descrip-
tion. In some companies, this ts into a formal innovation framework in
which certain parts of the company are tasked with nding innovations
that optimize current business processes, that are adjacent to existing
lines of business, or that are outside of the bounds of the current opera-
tions of the company but which have the potential to be thoroughly
disruptive, following Harvard professor Clayton M. Christensens
meaning of that term. The role of primary innovator is difcult to carry
out. Innovation in most cases is something that emerges unexpectedly
and is not predictable. To be tasked nding something new and valu-
able on a regular basis requires contact with many different parts of
an organization. Some companies put the responsibility for innovation
on every employee, and in such cases a business process expert who is
a primary innovator may be responsible for harvesting all of the ideas
that bubble up and running them through an evaluation process.
In the role of catalyst for innovation, a business process expert is
responsible for recognizing opportunities for innovation and bringing
them to the attention of the appropriate people. In this mode, innova-
tion is not a primary responsibility but something to be on the lookout
for. If a company has a formal process for innovation, the ideas that are
recognized should be submitted through it. Otherwise, the responsible
parties in the line of business or IT department should be notied.
The ve types of business process expert just described cover most
of the activities that were described in the research so far. While most of
the business process experts we talked to had skills in one or two of the
categories described, nobody acted as a business process expert in all
ve categories. This suggests that, to be a successful business process
expert, you must focus on a specic role that is well-suited to the skills
you have as well as to the needs of the organization.
Summary: The Value of Adopting the Business Process Expert
Role
The value of adopting the business process expert role primarily
accrues from accelerating the creation of IT solutions that are of high
quality and that serve the needs of the core processes of business
success. When the business process expert is a powerful advocate for
the business process perspective, and then speeds progress toward
support of the right processes through empathy, dramatic change can
take place. Bear in mind that this is not purely an evolution of the busi-
ness analyst role since the skills required are much more than those
of a business analyst and an application/implementation consultant
combined. However, there is reason to believe that those roles are well-
positioned to evolve into business process experts.
From the Wiki: Show Me the Value
BPX community member Jon Reed raises a question that is on
everyones mind: how, in times of downward rate pressure, to quan-
tify and justify the value of the business process expert. Clients may
push back and ask consultants not to get fancy, says Reed.
Furthermore, can the business process expert role be outsourced?
Since business process experts facilitate communication and solution
creation, the answer is quite probably no. Other skills can be com-
moditized, but business process experts bring a value-added factor
in helping foster solutions that enable efcient and effective busi-
ness processes. Effective communication cannot be outsourced.
If youve found a good way to quantify the value derived from
BPX-driven projects, please contribute what youve learned on the
wiki for this book, which is linked from bpx.sdn.com. Specically,
we are interested in learning how can a business process expert
convince the CFO that adopting a business process approach will
save a certain amount of the companys IT investment in the next 10
years, a savings that would be lost if the solution were implemented
without a business process approach.
Business process experts seem to act as a lubricant for communica-
tion and a catalyst for skill development and empowerment. In essence,
business process experts staff the gaps that exist in most organizations
between the business and technology sides. By focusing on the known
problems, project meltdowns can be avoided. Here are a few ways that
companies that have adopted the role have expressed the value of the
business process expert:
The rate of failure in creating and deploying solutions to support
business processes drops
Solutions are created faster
Companies become faster and more agile
Communication and cooperation between IT and the business side
are improved
More value is extracted from technology currently in place
Technology is aligned much more precisely to serve business
needs
The rest of this book covers topics that will speed your journey
toward making good use of the business process expert role in your
organization. Please visit the wiki and report back what you have
learned so that we can further improve this book.
59
4
The Business Process Expert Community
The business process expert role and the SAP Business Process
Expert (BPX) community (bpx.sap.com) are inseparable. The commu-
nity was started as a way to explore the role and to provide a place for
sharing leading practices around business process and solution design,
but it also helped dene, propagate, and evolve the business process
expert role. The vibrant participation of hundreds of thousands of
people and the exponential growth in membership indicates that the
business process expert role is indeed a welcome description of what
businesses need and want to institute to make a difference for their
customers. Every month, more business process professionals use the
community to be more effective, nd answers, and share their knowl-
edge. In this chapter, we will look at:
How the community got started
The technology capabilities and organizational basics of the
community
How people use the community to get their jobs done
Where the community is going
By understanding the history and scope of what business process
experts are doing inside the community, people who are not yet
involved will see the benets of participating in the community, while
community members may nd new ways to utilize the community for
their personal development.
Axel Angeli, community member and founder of Logos! Informatik,
stated that community is essential: No successful movement in the
world can work without a strong community backing it up. If you want
to evangelize the ideas of business process experts, you have to have
people who speak the same language, who support your ideas and
spread the word. You cannot have one person to spread the gospel. All
organizations that go out there and try to bring good ideas in the world
work in communities. If I go into a company and say, Im the expert,
and a question comes up and I cannot ask somebody else whom I trust,
then Im not a good expert. So community is an essential component
of every successful management strategy. Evangelism doesnt work
without community.
How the Business Process Expert Community Got Started
The SAP Business Process Expert community (BPX community
for short) was founded in response to an intuitive, felt need. It seemed
that there was a role that people were playing that bridges the domains
of business and technology. To see if this was in fact the case, back in
2005, the founders of the BPX community conducted surveys in the
SAP Developer Network (SDN), inquiring into the nature of the roles
people played in their work. They learned that roughly 20 percent of the
SDN community found it difcult to provide exact descriptions of their
jobs that related to the technical world; their work resided deeper in the
business world. About half of their work went toward meeting business
objectives while the other half was directed at achieving IT goals. This
discovery inspired the formation of the SAP Business Process Expert
community as a grassroots initiative.
The BPX community was established to create an environment to
help business process professionals alike to share, learn, and adapt to
the rapidly changing technology and business landscape. The main
idea was to use the power of the crowd to accelerate learning, connect-
Chapter 4: The Business Process Expert Community 61
ing, and sharing business process-related information for the benet
of customers.
The goals of the community were ambitious. The founders wanted
to help dene and support the role of the business process expert, as
well as to promote the business process perspective and the adoption of
the business process platform as a paradigm for enterprise computing.
Following the example of SDN, and using the same infrastructure, the
BPX community created a venue for sharing and capturing knowledge
through blogs, wikis, eLearning, webinars, and a content library. (In
fact, partly as a result of the growth of the BPX community, the original
SDN platform has changed its name from the SAP Developer Network
to the SAP Community Network, which currently encompasses three
communities: SDN, BPX, and Business Objects.)
The BPX community should be considered a collection of com-
munities with many specic topic communities under it. It is like a
country with many cities where people form subgroups to accomplish
their goals and share information and interests.
From the Wiki: The Value of Community
Richard Hirsch says, The BPX community provides me with a
means to meet other people who have similar interests. The com-
munity helps me a lot because it gives me the ability to ask questions
and talk to others who are dealing with the problems I am. We all
have an arena where we can test ideas and behavior patterns.
Today, the BPX community provides a strong social online Web
2.0 network for business process professionals such as business ana-
lysts and application and solution consultants. Members range from
members of the public to customers to partners to SAP employees who
are evolving into business process experts. The community enhances
members work lives by providing a platform to connect with peers
and share business process ideas, nd answers for related business
process and system implementation challenges, and nd the best
approach to new or existing processes. The community now has many
industry communities where business process experts can share their
knowledge about the specic industry challenges and trends they face.
To illustrate its rapid growth, the BPX community in 2007 had just 3
industry forums; it now has 18 and continues to expand organically.
In addition, the community has groups where people can nd answers
and share knowledge about functional topics such as Enterprise
Resource Planning, Customer Relationship Management, Supplier
Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management, Governance
Risk and Compliance, organizational change management, and so
forth. In 2008, the BPX community became the designated place where
members would nd all documentation of the Enhancement Packages
to SAP ERP, the regular stream of updates to the SAP Business Suite
that includes the Enterprise Services bundles, sets of web services that
provide access to data and functionality that can be used to create
widgets, mashups, and composite applications to support business
processes.
Embracing Web 2.0 technologies, the community leverages the cre-
ativity and expertise of its diverse membership to deliver many benets
to all. Customers can delve into product offerings provided by SAP and
its partners, resolve implementation challenges, identify talent, and
learn about industry and process best practices. Business process pro-
fessionals are mastering effective implementation strategies, gaining
community-wide visibility, and growing their businesses by promoting
their expertise. Internal SAP experts and product mangers are commu-
nicating with customers to provide information about their solutions
and gather business requirements to improve SAP product offerings.
Through all of this collaboration, the BPX community supports busi-
ness process and solution success.
The Technology and Organizational Structure of the Business
Process Expert Community
The BPX community is based on the same technology infrastruc-
ture as the SAP Developer Network. The community works, like most
online communities, because technology supports the interaction
among thousands of people who connect with each other and continue
to interact both through the community and through other means. A
major amplier of community activity is the regular meetings between
community members that take place at SAP events like SAPPHIRE and
TechEd, as well as at other local gatherings inspired by mentors and
top contributors. At these face-to-face meetings, people complete the
introductions that began online and create lasting and fruitful busi-
ness relationships as well as friendships.
From the Wiki: Online and Face to Face
Matt Stultz, Home Depot's director of SAP technology, states
that the business process experts who are emerging within Home
Depot make regular use of the industry communities. Home Depot
hosts local chapter events in Georgia, Stultz says, that are regularly
attended by over 300 professionals. According to Stultz, the events
have been a great mechanism for involving people who might not
otherwise be aware of SAP organizations. The benet of this setting
is plain: people with varying skill sets and knowledge gather to share
what they know in the hopes that new, unforeseen ideas might
result.
Here are some of the main collaboration capabilities of the BPX
community that support interaction among its members:
Community Home Pages: The BPX community has many com-
munity home pages and section pages that highlight content and
that are refreshed like a weekly newspaper. These pages relate to
specic industries, topics, and areas of interest such as enterprise
SOA and business process modeling. They provide a good rst stop
to nd out whats going on related to a specic interest.
Forums: The discussion forums of the BPX community allow people
to ask questions and get answers from other community members,
to bring up ideas for discussion, and to generally broadcast ideas
and collect responses. Forum questions range from general ques-
tions that are asked over and over again (How do I get started as
a business process expert?) to the specic and highly functional
(How do I set up General Ledger according to Chinese compliance
laws). Many members nd that forums are frequently used as a
starting point for their involvement in the community and become
their favorite resource.
Wikis: The BPX community has made fascinating use of wikis for
many different purposes. The canonical version of this book, for
example, is located on one of the BPX wikis. Other projects on the
wiki include a series of scripts created by members to explore the
situations that face business process experts in the workplace, as
well as training materials about how to become a business process
expert advocate and how to use modeling tools. Youll also nd
analysis of key performance indicators (KPIs) and documentation
of end-to-end scenarios. All of the content on the wikis is available
for editing and commenting.
From the Wiki: How Human Interaction Affects
Business Steps and Processes
Richard Hirsch speaks very highly of a venture on the BPX com-
munity wiki that provides a setting for community members to
engage in a virtual project. Once everyone has logged on, each
person adopts virtual roles, including the business process expert,
the business analyst, and the enterprise architect. After that, they
all work together to solve a common problem via instant messaging.
The resulting scripts are posted on the wiki.
Blogs: People with something to saywhether SAP staff, partners,
companies that use SAP, consultants, analysts, or othersall put
their thoughts out for consideration on blogs that appear on the
community. Lively discussions are frequently sparked on the com-
ments section of provocative blogs, and it is not uncommon for one
blog to spark many others.
Articles: The articles section is a shared content library that includes
contributions from all the communities on the SAP Community
Network (SCN). The repository mostly contains PDF articles, white
papers, and presentations that have been uploaded from various
sources. Articles can be found by keyword search and by navigat-
ing the tags assigned to the articles, as well as via the home pages
and the article archive. Blogs and wikis are frequently created as
guides to collections of articles.
eLearning and Podcasts: eLearning and podcasts that cover
technology and best practices of all kinds are available on the BPX
community. These modules provide audio commentary of slide
presentations as well as audio and video sessions. The eLearning
library is shared with all the communities on SCN and can be navi-
gated by tags.
Collaborative Workspaces (cw.sap.com): These are private areas
for collaboration limited to a smaller group working on conden-
tial material, like new innovative business processes, or white
space analysis, or BPX roundtables. The nature of this collabora-
tion is private and it normally operates only for a limited time, until
information is ready for prime time in the public areas of the BPX
community. Furthermore, this part of the community is not yet
hosted on the SAP Community Network platform but is in its own
separate area. By the end of 2008, this will be integrated within the
SCN platform.
These are merely some of the capabilities that comprise the current
repository of business process expert content and the means by which
people nd each other and communicate. Further acceleration of
activity on the community takes place through the evangelism of
community staff, mentors, and evangelists. People like myself, Marilyn
Pratt, Richard Hirsch, Helen Sunderland, Jon Reed, Puneet Suppal, Paul
Taylor, Anne Fish and many others (forgive us if we did not mention
you by name) play the role of editors, evangelists, writers, and modera-
tors who suggest ideas, make connections, sponsor projects, organize
events, answer questions, and generally do whatever it takes to make
the community work for other members.
How the Business Process Expert Community Is Used
Online communities often seem like plates of spaghetti. If you pick
up one strand, you never know which others may be connected. You
may start with a forum question, get some information, see an insight-
ful answer, look up the blog written by that person, and nd that she
has written an article that introduces you to new ideas. Section pages,
blogs, wikis, forums, eLearning are all entry points that can lead in
multiple directions.
While the connections between the content in the community may
be sprawling and unpredictable, many different patterns have emerged
for how people use the community to solve their problems and connect
with peers.
Finding Answers, Sharing Knowledge
Perhaps the most common activity in the BPX community, and
pretty much every other online community, takes place today in forums
and in the comment sections of blogs and on wiki pages. Chatting,
tweeting, and instant messaging are still used in a monolithic way
but trends indicate that these technologies are slowly integrating with
online community platforms. Someone puts out a question in search
of knowledge and others step up to the plate and share their knowl-
edge. This can happen amazingly fast. The most popular queries are
answered within about 20 minutes. The benet to the person asking the
question is clear: getting an answer and learning from the experience
of others. The benet to the person providing the answer is also clear.
The motive is often philanthropical, and it may have the side effect of
enhancing the responders reputation. You can also learn from answer-
ing questions and be stimulated to think new thoughts.
Alexander Ob, moderator of the BPX Governance, Risk, and
Compliance community and SAP Customer Advisor, sees sharing
knowledge as an online extension of natural human behavior, The
web technology allows interaction worldwide. Ten years ago, you had
to attend a conference. Twenty years ago, we had news groups and that
was similar to what we have now with forums. People have an innate
willingness to share and support each other in similar quests.
Collaboration about questions and answers takes place across
boundaries that are sometimes not crossed in other domains. It is not
uncommon for people from competing companies to help each other
nd needed information. Sometimes this happens because people
dont know who they are talking to. Other times it happens even though
people know they are working with a competitor, because the commu-
nity is a safe place to focus on craft and best practices.
In a way, the creation of online communities like the BPX com-
munity has seen a shift in the way we ndand sometimes how we
pay forknowledge. It used to be a value among technologists to keep
secrets since their knowledge was a key to job security. Today, the value
is sharing, and much knowledge that used to be hard won through long
experience is now available quickly through the forums, blogs, wikis,
articles, and eLearning. You can use this ability to nd answers and
sometimes to evaluate knowledge workers such as consultants. If they
tell you something, you can then check it against what the community
tells you and improve your ability to evaluate how someone will be able
to help.
Sharing on the BPX web site allows spreading information much
faster and much more effectively, said Alexander Ob. It somewhat
devalues the guru knowledge, the special knowledge, the special
experience, because theres a range of very experienced people who are
willing to share. So, where 10 years ago you paid $2,000 for somebody
who has a special expertise, that special expertise is now sometimes
freely available to anybody who understands the basics of how to use
the BPX community. It should be noted that we live in an age of increas-
ing information. While more information is freely available today, the
application of specialized knowledge to particular business problems
is still well worth paying for, in many cases.
The Intellectual Property Dilemma
Often we get questions about why people would share their intel-
lectual property: the business processes and solutions that form the
basis of how they make money. Several points should be considered.
In many cases, it could be that the knowledge is generally known so
that in its essence, it is not really intellectual property. First, consider
the knowledge about standard business processes that made the cre-
ation of standard software suites possible by the likes of SAP, Oracle,
PeopleSoft, Siebel, and others. Second, it may be that the person believes
that sharing a portion of their knowledge or expertise will create an
appetite for more and thus that sharing becomes, in essence, a product
sample that leads to more business. It just takes a few experts to start
the re and join a dialog about a topic, a dialog with many possibilities.
Third, as the world becomes increasingly complex, and more mashups
and solutions are created (even beyond the boundaries of your own
company), knowledge of the business process is no longer the key
differentiator for many professionals. Instead, they must know how to
take advantage of business process knowledge and select or design the
appropriate solutions for meeting customers needs.
In a discussion with Richard Campione, who heads the business
suite solution management organization at SAP, another important
topic about sharing knowledge was raised. Why would SAP and its eco-
system open up a public community that shares important and related
solution knowledge with, for instance, competitors? Richard made a
quick reference to the Cold War. The former USSR kept its knowledge
contained and private and in the end lost the Cold War, whereas the US
opened up its gates of knowledge to be shared collectively and, in so
doing, made faster advances than the USSR and came out the winner.
It is believed that the SAP ecosystem will grow faster by openly sharing
most knowledge than it would if it would it kept this knowledge a
secret.
Phil Kisloff, an SAP mentor, explains it similarly. The economic
benet, to a company or a business, of giving freely of your time or
sharing insights or experiences is, in a way, the same economics of the
open source movement. At a point long ago passed, not being part of
the project became more costly than being on the inside, in terms of
net opportunity for learning lost.
Finding People to Help
The BPX community helps people nd and connect with others
who have expertise to solve business problems. Many of the people
answering questions on the BPX community are consultants for whom
knowledge sharing acts as a form of personal visibility. People often
nd others inside their own organizations, as well as beyond the
borders of their companies, who are working on similar projects and
who are discussing their challenges or answering questions on the BPX
community. The BPX community is full of people who would be called
connectors according to the taxonomy of social networking found
in Malcolm Gladwells book, The Tipping Point. Frequently, a request
for assistance of some kind is met with a suggestion by a connector to
contact another person who has the sought-after expertise.
Training
Once an individual, a company, or a consulting rm has committed
to the business process expert role, or even found parts of the approach
or the associated domain knowledge useful, the community can be a
powerful and often free resource for training. The content in the blogs,
wikis, forums, and articles is organized and freshly updated by many
experienced and knowledgeable community members. If you are
looking for an introduction to business process modeling, you will nd
guides to all sorts of aspects of the topic, from high-level introductions
to swimlane diagram usage to deep dives into business and technology
issues. Most of the time, these guides are part narrative and part an
assembly of references to other content in the community. This is all
fueled by a powerful search engine that continues to improve.
At the level of the individual, the community is a goldmine for
people who are seeking to improve their skills and keep their knowl-
edge fresh. As Jon Reed, author of the SAP Consultant Handbook who
moderates Ask the Expert on SAP careers for searchSAP, says, The
seismic plates of SAP skill sets are shifting, but the opportunity is there,
like never before, to actively seek to ll any gaps in your own skill set.
Many new members of the BPX community are functional and
application consultants who want to evolve their SAP application-
specic skills in a specialty area. The community is able to help with
this by guiding conversations through a collection of forums such as
the one that is currently available for issues related to organizational
change management. When forums are created for specic purposes
in the BPX community, they ensure that the issues raised there are per-
tinent to those who join the forum. These forums are constantly being
pruned toward this end, says Marilyn Pratt, community evangelist for
the BPX community. For example, one organizational change manage-
ment forum, with two dedicated moderators, has been created from
a conglomerate of other similar but frequently unrelated forums, and
then trimmed down to guarantee that the threads posted to it address
change management from a purely technical standpoint.
Co-Innovation
SAP is promoting co-innovation with partners in its ecosystem
and with its customers through various initiatives. One example
is the Industry Value Networks that bring together select groups of
SAP, industry-leading customers, knowledgeable partners, and other
experts to examine the forces driving an industry to better determine
the technology needs to solve white space business problems. The
private Enterprise Services Community, part of the BPX community,
helps design collections of enterprise services that are implemented as
part of SAP products or submitted to standards organizations. SAPs
Co-innovation centers provide an environment for SAP customers,
partners, and startups to develop ideas and implement prototypes.
On the BPX community, there are numerous projects to create content
that have involved self-selected groups of community members. All
of the features of the BPX community support co-innovation, but the
Collaboration Workspace, the private space for BPX roundtable col-
laboration, has proven especially successful of late.
The BPX community supports co-innovation by acting as a sound-
ing board that can bring people to the table to help develop and improve
ideas. When David Lincourt, Vice President, Field Services in SAPs
Global Defense Industry Business Unit, developed a new widget, the
BPX community provided a means for him to spread the word about it
in ways that he had not foreseen. By announcing it in the community,
professionals whose presence he was unaware of responded with inter-
est. Soon, others were engaged, more network links were created, and
momentum grew. In the end, the value of the widgets functionality
sold itself. Without the evangelistic assistance of others, along with the
buzz that was created through it, Lincourt believes the project would
have taken much longer to get off the ground. When new users saw the
widget through the eyes of those who were already inspired by it, they,
too, reacted with excitement.
From the Wiki: Co-Innovation with Business KPIs
A project that has direct relevance for helping assess the value of
the business process expert is the KPI project, as it is affectionately
known in the BPX community. The Business KPIs wiki is the place
for ongoing quantication of key performance indicators, which can
help provide metrics by which to judge the success of initiatives. Visit
the Business KPIs wiki on the BPX community at: https://wiki.sdn.sap.
com:443/wiki/x/x4Y for links to videos, Second Life, and a wealth of
information about KPIs.
Knowledge Capture
In the equivalent of the cry from Andy Rooney and Judy Garland
musicals, Lets put on a show, business process experts have similarly
declared, Lets create knowledge. One project involved business
process experts playing different roles in IM sessions and then captur-
ing and analyzing the interaction. Individual contributors have started
the ball rolling with a blog post or a wiki page and then others have
joined in. Of course, as we all know, not every project really takes off,
but, the ability to start a project with nothing more than a good idea
means that much more genuine collaboration and knowledge sharing
can occur.
Identifying and Conrming Trends
The hive of activity in the community often reveals new direc-
tions in thinking and activity before they have become mainstream.
Alexander Ob nds that his position as a moderator of a section of the
BPX community provides him with a sense of whats happening next.
Axel Angeli feels that a community is necessary to understand trends,
stating that anticipating trends can only happen in a community
because you sense something is going on and then you conrm it with
others. Regular visitors to the BPX community are rewarded with a
preview of issues that are coming into wider circulation.
Understanding and Dening the Business Process Expert Role
Since its inception, the BPX community has been intrigued with
understanding how and why the business process expert role works.
The project to create this book is just one example, but the forums and
blogs are constantly offering up new perspectives and new techniques
to make business process experts all around the world more effective.
The BPX community is a place for frank discussion of your craft.
You can determine what works well, what doesnt, and what is hard,
without fear of being judged or attacked, said Axel Angeli. You sharpen
your skills, improve your arguments, and even engage in combat. You
can nd out from others how they solved problems you are facing. You
get advice about how to persuade others to get on board.
Where Is the Business Process Expert Community Going?
The BPX community is maturing. The rapid growth and substantial
collection of content that has been created has proven the point that the
community and subsequent importance of the business process expert
role is a growing part of creating effective solutions. Now that critical
mass has been achieved, it is likely that the community will continue to
evolve to more directly support the needs of business process experts.
Here are a few of the directions that the BPX community could take:
Business Process Innovation and Product Development: The
BPX community could expand its scope of offerings to become the
premier online community and marketplace for business process
research, denition, modeling, application composition, and inno-
vation (solutions and processes), on which community members
can collaborate and share knowledge.
Marketplace: The BPX community could become a primary place
for co-innovation and product development, constantly where SAP
customers and partners can model, market, demo, or sell solutions
and related services.
Product and Solution Development: The ability of the BPX com-
munity to reveal trends and user requirements could result in more
communication between business process experts and Solution
Managers who are designing the next generation of SAP products.
It also could become one of the primary feedback channels for
such development, for instance, via semi-private beta product and
solution communities, where experts and customers can vote and
react to features proposed. Imagine the possibilities to move tradi-
tional help documentation that comes with products to an online
wiki environment where it can be kept up to date and improved by
customers and partners as well as staff.
Increased Partner Presence: As customer needs are increasingly
met, not just by SAP products and services, but also by coordinated
ecosystems involving partner offerings, partners may show up
more prominently in the BPX community.
Events: Someday, perhaps a global event or conference will take
its natural place alongside SAPPHIRE and TechEd and provide a
forum for meetings and education to promote the topics that make
up the business process expert role and help everyone improve
their craft.
While any of these developments would be exciting and useful, it
is likely that the most important new directions of the BPX community
will not be planned but will emerge from community members who see
new ways for the community to serve their needs.
As noted at the beginning of the chapter, the BPX community
continues to grow, aiming to support and enhance the work lives of
the evolving resident business process experts. We want to remain
the leading platform that enables you to connect with peers and share
business process ideas, nd answers for related business process and
system implementation challenges, and nd solutions for new or
existing processes. The possibilities are indeed exciting. Imagine busi-
ness process experts sitting in meetings with customers and nding
answers on a mobile device in a second. Imagine members podcasting
on the y using their phones. Imagine members taking a picture of a
whiteboard with a process idea and sharing that via a tweet with their
closest friends to ask for feedback. Imagine private spaces where you
are allowed to design on the y from anywhere in the world. Imagine
the ability to do VOIP video conferencing that is recorded on the y and
posted in the community for anyone to view or join. It is community
meets business, accelerating solution creation by putting process rst.
75
5
Organizational Change Management and the
Business Process Expert
Organizations change because they want different business results,
motivated by ambition as well as by pain. A company seeks to move
to a new state of affairs because the management wants to spend less
money, make more money, or some combination of the two.
Change is almost never easy. People rarely do things the way they
do because they want to do a bad job. Current ways of working at most
companies are the result of historical precedent, habits, reactions to
past challenges, the inuence of technology, and directions from senior
management. Adopting a new way of working means leaving the world
of the proven and familiar and entering a new world that at rst seems
strange.
Organizational Change Management is the eld that is dedicated
to managing change in an orderly and effective manner. While practi-
tioners are able to point to a steady stream of successes and a growing
body of best practices, even the most enthusiastic do not claim that
change management as a discipline is an easy sell. Change manage-
ment is still something people have a better collective understanding
of these days, but they dont entirely trust it, said Kerry Brown, Global
Director of Organizational Change Management at SAP. They know
they need some of it, but theyre not so sure what to do. Brown nds
that people who have gone through disastrous attempts at transform-
ing their organizations are the ones most willing to learn.
Broadly, change management involves two areas: strategic and
organizational alignment. Organizational alignment involves coordi-
nating the goals, expectations, messages, and priorities that will result
in achieving new outcomes and is the highest level of change man-
agement. Once this is in place, the challenge in change management
becomes tactical, project- or program-level change management. This
involves making sure that everyone involved knows what they should
be doing and when and how it is related to what everyone else is doing.
The reason that the eld of change management exists is that people
do not take easily to change. There are four main reasons people resist
change, said Brown. I didnt know. I wasnt able. I wasnt involved.
And, Im not willing. Facing and conquering these forces requires
communication, building of trust, hard and soft skills, and a combina-
tion of stubbornness and empathy. Success comes when people start
to act differently, whether they like it or not, because they understand
why they are being asked to change. It is only after the changes have
stopped seeming strange and become habitual that the highest level of
performance will result.
Put another way, change management is about the dimensions of
people, process, and technology. The process denes the world you
want to achieve. The people must be convinced to go there. The tech-
nology is the enabler. An understanding of change management is vital
to business process experts because the task of addressing the issues
related to successful transformation of an organization frequently have
no owner and fall to them by default.
Chapter 5: Organizational Change Management and the Business Process Expert 77
From the Wiki: Different Responses to Change
Change is the only constant in life, but people don't like to
change. That is why it is important to introduce change gradually,
in small increments, to maximize the chance of acceptance. Start
with the easiest and simplest project that has the maximum chance
of success, recommends Business Process Expert (BPX) community
member Ashish Mehta. In every organization, roughly 10 to 15
% of people are innovators/early adopters who are willing to try
something new while about 65% will go with the crowd (followers)
and the remaining 15% or so are resistors, who chafe at any and all
change, observes Mehta. To ensure success, you have to win over
both the innovators/early adopters and the followers. The followers
need a little convincing, which can usually be achieved with your
rst small success. As for resistors, you have to treat them with velvet
gloves. Be careful not to let negativity spread, which is the forte of
this community of people.
The Specic Challenges of the Business Process Expert
Business process change does not happen in isolation. Business
process change becomes organizational change by denition, and in
most companies, organizational change has no explicit owner. It is up
to the team involved in effecting change to gure out how to manage
the change and make sure that it sticks. This means that the de facto
heads of change management are the project managers, line managers,
senior executives, information workers, and IT staff, who are most com-
mitted to making the change happen. If the business process expert role
is successful in even the slightest way, it means that business process
experts become part of the change management team.
But, in a sense, business process experts are different from many of
the other members of the team. Business process experts are outsiders.
They do not own the business process they are changing. They are a
coach or an assistant coach who provides advice. They are not on the
playing eld when the game starts.
Business process experts are also advocates and teachers of a
general perspective on business, the business process perspective
described in Chapter 1. This means that they are enabling the organi-
zation at large to embrace business process change and embrace the
technology to perform differently and get different results. Business
process experts cannot function in this role effectively without build-
ing trust and respecting the abilities of those who are on the playing
eld. They must be role models for an open mind and an eager attitude
about change, guided by the business process perspective, without
being overly prescriptive or exaggerating their own importance. It is a
tricky path to navigate and in this section of the chapter, we examine
some of the more difcult aspects of change management that business
process experts face.
Promoting the Business Process Perspective
Whether a business process expert calls it business process
perspective or not, one enduring change management challenge is
advocating the central role of business processes in business trans-
formation. The challenge in advocating for this perspective is that it is
rarely possible to convince people in one attempt that the elements of
the business process perspective are crucial to success.
In addition, parts of the business process perspective are aimed at
senior management (commitment to adapt the organization to support
business processes and work through challenges), other parts are more
important to line managers (thinking in terms of the process, not the
software, thinking in terms of the largest picture, incremental improve-
ment, process documentation), and still others are vital to the tech-
nologists involved (thinking in terms of the process not the software,
thinking in terms of the largest picture, incremental improvement).
In practice, this means that the business process expert must
opportunistically advocate for the business process perspective, both
explaining the theory and showing how various tactics that t into
the theory provide value. For example, if you create a document that
describes the end-to-end process, circulate it to all involved, and take
the time to get their reaction, many suggestions for improvements are
usually harvested.
But the business process expert must walk a ne line between being
an advocate for the business process perspective and being a nag or a
pest. Each project is an opportunity to convince and educate but you
dont have to win the entire battle and every heart and mind. The best
advertisement for the business process perspective is to create a new
way of working that delivers business results.
Business Process Maturity
The right role for a business process expert will change based on
the level of maturity that an organization has with respect to the busi-
ness process perspective and its ability to transform itself. Just intro-
ducing a business process expert into an environment that has never
been friendly to change and has technology that is not easy to adapt is
unlikely to succeed in the short term. The way that a business process
expert will be most effective will vary based on an organizations readi-
ness for the role.
If an organization is just starting out and there is little understand-
ing of the business process perspective or the business process expert
role, perhaps the best approach would be to only apply the new methods
to a series of pilot projects in order to build up credibility and create
more readiness in the wider organization based on a track record of
success. Perhaps a part-time business process expert could be assigned
to join these projects, someone from the project management team or
another department with wide responsibilities.
If a company is highly methodical already and has a well-dened
change management process in place and technology that is adapt-
able, then perhaps it makes sense to introduce a full-time business
process expert who can participate in many different projects and add
the missing elements of the business process perspective, such as the
separations of process design from software implementation and a
clear documentation of the end-to-end business process.
If a company is engaged in a constant cycle of incremental improve-
ment with adaptable technology and is friendly to the adoption of the
business process perspective, then perhaps it makes sense to have one
member of each team trained as a business process expert so that they
can bring the role to a wider audience.
Of course, these choices just scratch the surface of the different ways
to adopt the business process expert role, but factoring in the existing
maturity with respect to the business process perspective should be
part of all of them.
Interaction with Existing Roles
While the business process expert role represents a new combina-
tion of responsibilities, many of the tasks included overlap with existing
roles that are involved in planning for the future, process transforma-
tion, and creating solutions. In addition, the business process expert
must ask and get commitment and support from other people in order
to succeed. In other words, the business process expert is going to run
into others in the organization who may see the new role as a threat or
the support asked for as an inconvenience. If a business process expert
does not handle these interactions with nesse and care, success will
be quite difcult.
One of the implications of this overlap is that successful busi-
ness process experts mostly seem to be resident inside a company, as
opposed to outside consultants. It is one thing to have a new role show
up on your doorstep that may overlap with your current responsibili-
ties, but its another for that person to come from outside the company.
That may be too much to take.
Introducing the business process expert role into an organization
must be done carefully in order to obtain the maximum chance for
success. Business process experts do many things that other people
in the company currently do now. Many people will rightly wonder:
Am I being stripped of responsibilities? Others may see the arrival of
business process experts as an opportunity to unload parts of their jobs
that have been frustrating or difcult.
Perhaps the most important prerequisite for introduction of the
business process expert is pain. Companies that are building effective
and exible solutions do not feel a need to change their way of creating
solutions. It is only when a company is having trouble, or sees competi-
tors doing better, that the motivation for change emerges. When needed
solutions do not arrive, or when the solutions that do arrive do not meet
expectations, the stage is set properly for a business process expert.
So far, the business process experts involved in our research are a
sophisticated bunch. They all believe that the business process expert
role must be accepted readily by those involved in solution creation for
the highest productivity to ensue. Taking this acceptance for granted
is a grave mistake. Attempting to dictate to a team that you will work
with a business process expert is such a bad idea that it has never been
attempted by anyone with whom weve spoken.
Gaining acceptance for the role is rarely easy and involves persua-
sion and education. Here are some of the points that business process
experts have found are frequently raised with all of the different people
involved in discussions about adopting the business process expert
role.
Senior management must be on board for a business process expert
to succeed. In a perfect world, everything would go swimmingly on
every project. But in the real world, at times, projects will bog down,
success will appear far away, and some ngers will point toward
the business process expert as the culprit. In times like these, it is
important that senior management be supportive of the transfor-
mation toward the business process perspective. In selling the idea
of the role to senior management, business process experts must
be careful not to fall into the trap of setting unrealistically high
expectations. The best approach is to explain the theory behind
the role, the requirements for the people playing it, and the chal-
lenges involved in adoption, and then suggest a modest program
of expanded experimentation and the introduction of metrics that
will track progress. Often, the institution of a COO role or a Chief
Process Ofcer role can help accelerate the buy-in from the lines of
business, as well.
Line of business managers see the business process expert as just
another part of the process of creating IT solutions to automate
their business processes. They arent likely to have many objec-
tions about suggestions for improvements unless people on their
staff complain that the business process expert role is a threat to
success. If the business process expert role is successful, line of
business managers will be happy but will not really care why it
worked.
Process owners own a process from the business point of view.
They are the quarterback on the eld, or perhaps the head coach
who is responsible for success. For example, the director in charge
of warehouse management in a large company may be looking at
all the metrics about how the warehouse is run. The process owner
wants the IT solutions to help implement processes that will help
improve the business results. The process owners are frequently a
fountain of information about areas that are ripe for improvement
and innovation. The process owners care less about the details and
more about the results. They can be powerful advocates for change
if a business process expert can produce the results to gain their
trust.
Process experts lead the teams executing important parts of a
process and using the software that keeps track of it. These are the
people who know the ins and outs of the existing solutions and can
point to specic shortcomings and strengths in the way things are
automated. Business process experts tend to spend a huge amount
of time with process experts, understanding the existing systems
and brainstorming about improvements.
Business analysts are focused on looking at the way a line of busi-
ness works and providing analysis of business performance, pro-
cesses, and technology. Business analysts are usually an important
part of the innovation process and are expected to come up with
suggestions for optimizations and improvements. The business
process expert role can seem like a major incursion into this terri-
tory because of the leading role business process experts like to take
in business process design and promotion of the business process
perspective. In a company that uses the business analyst role, the
business process expert must be carefully promoted so as not to
cause conict. In the end, business analysts tend to be fellow travel-
ers with business process experts because they both are seeking to
achieve the same goals. Over time, we expect a convergence of the
business process expert role and the business analyst role. Perhaps
it will not be necessary to create Visio diagrams anymore; instead,
professionals can use modeling tools to make instant updates to
the systems that support the business process. We expect many
business analysts to evolve into business process experts.
End users, also called business users, use the systems. Business
process experts work with end users to understand existing systems
and to conrm that problems identied by process owners and
process experts are the whole story.
Project managers, like business process experts, frequently ll in
gaps as needed in support of change management and communi-
cation. A business process expert must be sensitive to the existing
role that a project manager is playing and how that ts in with the
business process perspective. Frequently, project managers are
among the easiest to convince of the value of starting the analysis
of solution creation with the business process because they have
seen things go wrong in so many other ways. If a project manager
is playing a role that a business process expert expected to play, the
right call is almost always to defer to the project manager. It doesnt
matter whos doing what as long as the needed work gets done.
CIOs and CTOs are the senior management level of the technology
department. Business process experts sometimes have a challenge
building trust with these executives because the imposition of the
business process expert role can be seen as a failure on the part of
the IT department. Political issues can arise when the topic of who
business process experts should report to is discussed. But most of
the time technology management understand the business process
expert role and does everything they can to support it. Also, as the
power of the CIO seems to be eroding, it is of interest to the CIOs of
the future to heavily engage and support the creation of a business
process expert organization.
Enterprise architects are usually highly focused on business
processes and nd that the business process expert role can help
raise the prole of BPM in the solution creation process. Business
process experts frequently nd that the most extensive descriptions
of business processes and the most advanced modeling tools are
used by enterprise architects. The fact that business process experts
also attempt to exert leadership with respect to business process
design and the planning for transformation of business processes
over the long term can lead to tension with enterprise architects.
Much of the time this tension is resolved because business process
experts are usually focused on the short and medium term and
enterprise architects are primarily interested in the medium and
long term. The two roles have powerful common ground in that
both are interested in promoting the business process perspective.
You can probably imagine the enterprise architect dening the IT
landscape and the master business process expert (the business
process architect) dening the process landscape.
Application experts have a deep understanding of how to congure
enterprise applications. Business process experts usually spend
a lot of time with application experts understanding the way that
processes are currently automated by the applications. Application
experts also provide an understanding of what functionality is not
being used and how the applications are service enabled. Business
process experts can conict with application experts over the right
way to create a solution. Sometimes application experts think
more in terms of the capabilities of the application instead of the
ideal process, which is the perspective advocated by the business
process expert. However, most of the time application experts and
business process experts work in harmony to pursue implementa-
tion of processes that are most benecial to the business. Similar to
the business analyst, the application expert could easily evolve to
become a resident business process expert.
Technology architects are responsible for designing architecture
for the software and hardware that implement solutions. Business
process experts have long conversations to make sure that solution
requirements are clear and that the business process perspective is
central to the way solutions are designed. Business process experts
can clash with technology architects if the needs of the business
processes conict with infrastructure choices, although such con-
icts are rare.
Engineers and developers build the solutions that business process
experts help design. Business process experts spend time with
developers understanding the effort involved in creating various
aspects of the solution. Business process experts also get help from
engineers and developers in evaluating the quality of model-driven
development tools. Conicts between business process experts and
developers can arise if developers attempt to turn every problem
into a development project instead of using standard software as
much as possible.
In each company the business process expert will ght a different
battle to gain acceptance, prove the role is valuable, and then propagate
it. While the nature of the battles fought at each company may vary
widely, the cast of characters just described is usually the same.
Conicting Perspectives
Some of the conict mentioned in the previous analysis of existing
roles in the enterprise is caused not only by overlapping responsibili-
ties but also by conicts between the business process perspective and
other perspectives on how to create the best solutions for enterprise
computing.
Owen Pettiford, an IT professional with 20 years experience and
founder of CompriseIT, has done some fascinating analysis on his blog
of these other perspectives and how they conict with the business
process perspective.
Pettiford points out that the current collection of technology that
surrounds enterprise applications offers a new paradigm for solution
creation. It is now possible, through service-oriented architecture,
application composition tools, business process management technol-
ogy, and other mechanisms, to implement a process in a exible manner
and add anything extra that is needed by implementing a service. In
other words, you rarely have to start from scratch. You also rarely have
to live with, and be constrained by, what an application does, because
so much is possible through conguration and composition.
However, unfortunately, the understanding of what is possible in
the era of SOA and composition is sometimes a hard sell. Standing in the
way are perspectives about how to build solutions that are stubbornly
held, because at times they are profoundly right. Competing with the
business process expert and the implied business process perspective
are the views held by many other types of experts.
From the Wiki: Making Change a Win-Win Situation
I have noticed an interesting thing during my time in IT, reports
community member Ashish Mehta. Effective change rarely results
from top-down initiatives. That is where most consultants fail. They
come into an organization with preconceived ideas and predened
ways of thinking and xing problems. They push their product or
solution and then encounter resistance from somewhere in the rank
and le or sometimes even from management. Management buy-in
is important, undoubtedly; if you do not have approval from man-
agement, you will not get very far in the project and funding could
start to become a serious issue. However, even more important is
rank and le acceptance. This is how I try to impart change. First, I
talk with senior management, the head of IT or CIO as well as the
head of nance or CFO to discover their main pain points. Then I
mold my solution/product to meet their needs. I draw a picture of
the workow to illustrate what I plan to achieve. After that, I tell
management that I want to hear what employees and end users are
feeling. I spend time talking with users and gure out ways to help
them do their jobs better. You know, most employees will gladly
provide you with the information you need when you tell them
you want to help them do their job better. In this way, resistance
to change melts away, and the chances of success greatly increase.
Finally I put the graphic of the process on the hallways and make it a
visible issue for the entire company. Its all about creating a win-win
situation.
Application experts, who Pettiford calls platform application
experts in his blog, tend to try to satisfy every business requirement
with the capabilities of the existing application. While in the past
this has saved time because it has forced some processes that were
customized for no powerful reason into the standard form imple-
mented in an application, it also has costs in terms of innovation. If
a process that deviates from the idea is not supported by the appli-
cation as it stands, a conict can arise between people who want to
implement the optimal process and those who want to change the
process to meet the capabilities of the application. In their work,
application experts and their kin say, This is what the application
can do; this is what you can have.
Industry solution experts, partner solution experts, and com-
posite application experts take the same perspective as platform
application experts, except with regard to an industry or partner
solution or composite application.
Enterprise portal experts tend to see every problem as a chance to
whip up a new portal application.
Platform development experts and composite development
experts see every problem as an invitation to custom develop-
ment. They may be frustrated by the business process perspective
because reuse increases and opportunities for new development
are rarer and are focused on creating reusable services. At their
worst, development experts say, Lets make it perfect, just what
you want, without regard to the cost now or in the future.
Pettiford does not claim that these perspectives are exhaustive.
There are plenty of other narrow ways of thinking to add to these that
constrain the world of the possible. The challenge faced by business
process experts is to get everyone involved to rise above these perspec-
tives when needed and adopt the business process perspective, which
means designing the process rst, and then implementing it as well as
possible using enabling technology.
Lessons Learned about Adopting the Business Process Expert
Role
Introducing the business process expert role successfully to a
company is something of an art form. Each company is different with
respect to its business process maturity, readiness for change, and
motivation for adopting the role. While universally applicable advice is
hard to come by, the business process experts we talked to in perform-
ing research for this book did have some insights to offer that may be
helpful.
Grassroots Beginnings
Our research has shown that planning for a formal introduction of
the business process expert role by a management-led team is almost
never the way that business process experts rst emerge at a company.
The most common path is that people start visiting SAPs BPX com-
munity site, or nd out about the role in other ways on the Internet, and
then they just start doing what other business process experts do. Most
of the time, this results in delivering improved solutions, perhaps after
a few false starts. But then, in most healthy companies, somebody asks
the question, Why did this project go well when others did not? What is
different here? Thats when the discussion of introducing the business
process expert at an institutional level begins.
At this point, the challenge becomes dening the role in a way
that is likely to succeed at the company in question, to obtain the right
people to become business process experts and give them the needed
resources, and nally to make sure that the rst wave of business
process experts have the right skills and abilities. Then, if expectations
are set properly, it is possible for the business process expert role to
become accepted.
The Elements of Successful Adoption
While each of the companies that have adopted the business process
expert role has gone on a unique journey, some common elements have
emerged so far and a pattern of successful adoption is starting to take
a general form:
The grassroots introduction of the business process expert role
happens when someone in the company thinks that using the role
would make sense and starts to act as a business process expert.
Early successes lead to a discussion of wider adoption.
Senior management buys into the business process perspective
and the business process expert role and decides to attempt to
adopt the role more widely. This usually happens gradually. We
have not found a companywide, big-bang introduction of the busi-
ness process expert role.
Experimentation leads to renement of what the business process
expert role should be for the company in question. Best practices
are developed. The role is adapted to the business process maturity
and change management practices of the company. The required
technology landscape is improved.
The business process expert role is institutionalized and propa-
gated. Formal job descriptions are developed along with training
and certication. Business process experts start to show up on the
organizational chart. Metrics and KPIs to track the impact of the
role are developed and monitored.
The rest of the chapter touches on some of the thornier issues that
arisewhen adopting the business process expert role.
Focus on Points of Pain
One way to maximize the return of applying the business process
expert role is to focus the initial efforts on the worst performing parts
of the company. Points of pain can be a trigger that spurs collabora-
tion and action. On the other hand, this approach can be risky because
areas that are points of pain usually have intractable issues related to
personnel, politics, or shortcomings in the capabilities of technology.
A business process expert must be brave to wade into such a situation.
Even in these areas, change may be resisted. As Axel Angeli put it, Why
should I change anything? Everything works ne. The hammer falls on
my toe once a day, but Ive gotten used to it.
But xing problems in a department that has been an enduring
source of pain for a company is one way to build credibility that the
role is worthwhile. If business process experts can help make the most
negative situation better, it will be likely that they will be able to x
areas that are less pathological.
From the Wiki: To Change or Not to Change
Business users and project sponsors may rely on business process
experts for recommendations about whether system changes are
required or whether some workaround can be found. The business
process expert uses his judgment to recommend changes or work-
arounds based on knowledge of user capabilities, cost implications,
and possible benets to the organization, according to BPX com-
munity member Ajay Ganpat Chavan.
Focus on Strategic Projects
Another choice that is made frequently is to apply the business
process expert to the most important solution creation project facing
a company as a form of insurance that things will go well. Making this
choice means that the stakes are high for the business process expert. If
anything goes wrong, they will likely share the blame. But when man-
agement introduces the business process expert role into key projects, it
is also a vote of condence in the role and the business process experts
who are assigned.
Focus on Enthusiasm
Following the enthusiasm of the staff for adopting the business
process expert role can be a low-risk way to create demonstrations
of how the role can help. Under this scenario, management explains
the new role and then allows teams involved in solution creation to
introduce the role by accepting a new member or by sending one of
their team for training. In this way, the company takes the path of least
resistance and promotes the business process expert role where it is
wanted most.
Create a Center of Excellence
Creating a central team of business process experts is yet another
way of introducing the role. Under this scenario, a central team of
business process experts that can be assigned to projects as needed is
created and trained. This method frequently works well because the
central team acts as a clearinghouse for information about how to suc-
cessfully adopt the role.
Metrics and KPIs for Tracking Success
Business process experts frequently make a difference in many
ways, both tangible and intangible. Metrics and KPIs for business
process experts are not a luxury or something that is helpful or nice
to have; they are a matter of survival. But senior management rarely
is impressed by enthusiastic testimonialsthey want demonstrable
results.
Without metrics, the business process expert role is something you
have to have faith in. This is not a reasonable basis for commitment to
the business process expert role. There must be some kind of success
metrics so that the value can be documented and the business process
expert role can be justied during inevitable downturns when organi-
zations shrink.
While it can be a challenge to construct metrics that show the full
value of the business process expert role, showing impact in the follow-
ing metrics has proven helpful in making the case:
Reduction in cancelled or failed projects
Reduction in length of projects
Increase in projects delivered on time
Increase in user suggestions harvested and implemented
Increase in effciency based on better processes and solutions
Increase in clock speed for the cycle of incremental improvements
Increase in number of users getting the beneft of existing
technology
While some of these metrics are pretty soft and fuzzy and will
be hard to track, it is vital that persistent effort be made by business
process experts to demonstrate the value of their role and of the busi-
ness process perspective until the entire organization has been shown
the benets.
Mistakes to Watch Out For
Becoming a business process expert is a truly satisfying endeavor.
The sheer pleasure of mastering the skills and the feeling of really
making a difference in a company is evident in the continuing waves
of enthusiasm that are expressed on the business process expert com-
munity. But few who have mastered the role report that it felt easy.
One of the things that the research for this book revealed is a collec-
tion of pitfalls that can retard the progress of a business process expert.
We list them here in the hopes that readers will be inspired to add to
this list by joining in the discussion at the wiki version of this book.
Intolerance for Ambiguity
It is a mistake to expect that things will proceed in a highly struc-
tured predictable manner in your work as a business process expert.
To succeed, Kerry Brown suggests that business process experts
must have a high tolerance for ambiguity, meaning that they must be
comfortable with the many distractions that will arise and the fact that
there may be many ways to get to the end result.
If you look at the business process expert role, they are basically
living constantly in a project lifecycle, if you will, said Brown. They
have to be agile and adaptive to new information, new data, new
requirements all the time. And so, being able to say, Im going to go
work on this from A to F, and I know that these are the six steps in
between, is nave, because they say theyre going to work from A to F,
but theyre going to have 262 distractions between A and F.
A Sense of Ownership
It is a mistake to act as if you are an owner of the processes you are
helping improve.
Business process experts help transform the processes and sup-
porting systems at a company, but for the change to be complete, the
team that owns the process must feel that they were responsible for the
change and have a stake in making the new way of working successful.
The business process expert role is by denition a facilitator,
consultative role, collaborative role, so business process experts dont
ever actually own the outcome, said Brown. They own contributing
to the outcome and accelerating the outcome, but they dont own the
outcome. They dont own the process. And so theyve got to take a
consultative approach, whether or not theyre internal, external or
otherwise, in order to inuence people to change, versus attempting to
control that change. Sustainable change comes from creating shared
ownership.
From the Wiki: Pass It On
The solution creation that business process experts help facilitate
is the product of true collaboration among various parties, so the
business process expert shouldnt be seen as a miracle worker with a
halo. Its true that the language used by IT professionals frequently
distances them from the business units, says BPX community member
Anbazhagan Sam Venkatesan. Business process experts come on the
scene as facilitators. The solutions that they help facilitate are the
outcome of a collaboration of the departments representing users
(sometimes called the user department), the IT department, and
business process experts.
Any solution requires implementation, in which the user depart-
ment plays a key role, with intermittent interaction with the IT
department and perhaps occasional interaction with the business
process expert. A successful business process expert passes on the
ownership of the solution to the user department and IT.
Not ListeningThinking You Are the Expert
It is a mistake to attempt to teach rst and listen second.
Business process experts are usually proud of what they know and
are eager teachers. But the time for teaching is usually after the people
who own the process have had a chance to speak. The people who own
the process, who are toiling with it every day, usually have a great per-
spective about what is wrong and what could be better. This should be
the foundation, and the knowledge and skills of the business process
expert should come out opportunistically, as needed.
Overpromising
It is a mistake to set expectations too high.
The world of technology is full of people who are so eager to help
that they downplay difculties and assume that the world moves faster
than it actually does. Business process experts, like all technologists,
can fall prey to this error. Seeming too optimistic can reduce credibility
with people who are experienced and know how long things take and
how difcult change can be.
Staying Hands On
It is a mistake to take too much of an advisory role.
Business process experts are not just consultants; they must join in
projects and help do the work. If you tell a team to try something and
report back on how it went, you will get a much different reaction than
if you join in the process of change and help as you can.
95
6
In the strictest sense, the business process expert role should be
technology-agnostic, never promoting technology for its own sake or
favoring one form over another. A business process expert should be
able to help a company do better even in a situation in which no tech-
nology is brought to bear, simply by promoting the business process
perspective.
But in the modern world of business, everything is intermediated
and supported by technology. Discussions of the best practices for busi-
ness processes quickly lead to the discussion of solutions that support
those processes. Technology plays an important role and the business
process expert must be uent in helping organizations nd the right
tools for the right job. After all, not all technology for collaboration is
created equal; some collaboration platforms work better than others to
support working in teams, for example.
The challenge for this chapter is that the world of technology is
so vast and changes so quickly that it is hard to summarize how the
business process expert can best make use of it all. The need to effec-
tively apply technology is one of the reasons for the creation of the SAP
The Technology Environment for the Business
Process Expert
Business Process Expert (BPX) community, which helps to assist busi-
ness process experts through the ins and outs of the technology maze.
Experience has shown that business process experts must be armed
with technology and supporting capabilities to make the maximum
contribution to their companies. Once a company has adopted the
business process perspective, for the business process expert to be
most effective, companies must have a minimum of business process
maturity and technology infrastructure. Companies that have cul-
tivated and nurtured their technology landscape to meet the needs
of their processes will be the rst to benet from a business process
experts talents.
Many business process experts make a difference right away. It is
possible to make quite an impact through informal means that lead
to improved communication in the solution creation process. But
the rst wave of business process experts have found that larger and
longer lasting benets are created by institutionalizing communica-
tion and expanding participation in solution creation with supporting
technologies.
The ideal technology landscape is rich in functionality and offers
substantial exibility. If all roads lead to custom development, a bottle-
neck will be sure to develop. If all roads lead to an ERP system, then
the scope of conguration of ERP will become the constraint. If it is
hard to communicate and collaborate, solution creation will be slowed
down. If no emphasis is placed on dening solutions at the BPM level,
then an application-centric view of the world will ll the void. If the
infrastructure for SOA is immature and unreliable, it will be hard to
create exible solutions and react quickly to changing process needs.
Today we believe that the preferred technological environment for
a business process expert is one in which a strong foundation of con-
gurable SOA-enabled enterprise applications is supplemented by a
dial-tone for collaboration and the ability to use services and business
process modeling tools to accelerate the creation and implementation
of composite applications and mashups. Availability of tools for model-
ing and development can also expand the number of people who can
participate in solution creation. The same is true for simplied ways of
Chapter 6: The Technology Environment for the Business Process Expert 97
conguring applications or user-friendly methods of composing new
solutions based on services. An environment with all these elements
provides a rich pallet for automation.
The question that this chapter seeks to answer is simple:
What are the enabling technologies that each category of business
process expert needs to do his or her job to maximum effect?
In Chapter 3, we described ve styles of business process expert,
each of which puts the empathy, technology, and change management
skills of the business process expert to work in a different way. The type
of role that may be appropriate differs for each organization. In some
organizations, business process experts may play one or more of these
roles or combine them in new ways. We are still in the early days and
new discoveries happen at every company that adopts the role.
This chapter looks at the technology that is related to each role a
business process expert may play. Of course, all technology potentially
applies to any role that a business process expert may play. We are
grouping the technologies discussed by role not as a strict categoriza-
tion but as a way to organize our discussion of this vast topic.
Technology Related to the Business Process Expert as
Organizational Therapist
In the organizational therapist role, the business process expert
identies and solves communication problems. In environments with
poor communication, conicts become routine and mistrust grows.
Abusive and disrespectful behavior becomes a habit.
Technology does not directly play a role in resolving this acrimony.
This is the task of a business process expert who gains the trust of both
sides and reestablishes trust that paves the way for communication
and productivity.
But once a business process expert has treated the initial pathol-
ogy and the technology and business sides want to communicate with
each other and work together, establishing an easy-to-use dial tone
for communication and collaboration can be an investment that pays
huge dividends. Business process experts who act as organizational
therapists help recreate communities that have broken down or never
existed. Technology can play a role in sustaining those communities.
A company introducing the business process expert role will nd
that the technologies mentioned here will help amplify the impact of a
talented business process expert and institutionalize positive patterns
of behavior.
Video, Blogs, and Podcasts
We often think of blogs as a global megaphone that allows one
person to broadcast her thoughts. But blogs, whether written, video, or
audio, can also be used as a collective communication mechanism for
a group of people working on a project. In this scenario, the blog is not
just a forum for one person but can contain entries from anyone working
on the project. In this way, thoughts and questions can be captured and
the entire team becomes aware of each others thinking. The best blogs
are often a summary of what the business process expert experienced
that day, week, or month and are used as a collection of useful links by
others that have limited time. Everyone can also participate in answer-
ing questions.
Project blogs have proven to be an effective way of proposing, ren-
ing, and propagating best practices.
Wikis
Wikis create a shared space to support collaboration and shared
content creation, which can be used for project management, require-
ments gathering, creating documentation, and many other activities.
Wikis often take root in unpredictable ways. Frequently the best
approach is to introduce them and use them for a particular purpose
and then a community of users forms and takes the wiki in many
different directions. As wikis evolve to become more tailored to the
business, we will see many different types of wikis, including process
wikis, content wikis, spreadsheet wikis, and more.
Instant Messaging and Group Chat
One of the lessons of agile development is that developers must be
in close proximity with the users for whom they are creating applica-
tions. Some practitioners of eXtreme Programming suggest that the
development team be within 20 feet of the users so that questions can
be asked and answered quickly.
Another way to achieve this intimacy is through instant messaging.
If developers and users can ping each other with an instant message
to answer questions quickly, then the ow of development can move
quickly forward. Some companies, like Yahoo, have already moved
their primary way of communication from email to IM.
Teleconferencing, Webconferencing, and Videoconferencing
When blogs, wikis, and instant messaging are in use, frequently
important issues bubble up that require input from more people. The
ability to bring teams together quickly through (VOIP) teleconfer-
encing, webconferencing, and videoconferencing often accelerates
communication.
Ease of use is the key to achieving benets from these collaborative
technologies. The faster the path from thought to collaboration through
one of these mechanisms, the more likely they will be used. If it is easy
to go from a teleconference to a web conference for screen sharing, that
option will be used frequently.
Information on Demand
To have the ability not only to broadcast, but also to replay informa-
tion on demand for an end user, offers the possibility of assimilating
new ideas, processes, or solutions at their own pace. This is increasingly
important as most organizations are becoming globally at.
Requirements and Process Analyst
The business process expert who acts as a requirements and process
analyst uses tools to capture knowledge and represent it in forms that
describe solutions. The collaborative technologies just covered can
play an important role in capturing requirements and improving them
through collaboration.
Much pioneering work is currently being done in the realm of busi-
ness process management (BPM), the practice of designing solutions
by modeling business processes in abstract ways and then using those
models to create solutions.
From the Wiki: The Importance of Secure Coding Skills
Business process experts need to have a sufcient understanding
of security in general, and secure coding in particular, states commu-
nity member Ashish Mehta. Such knowledge is necessary to ensure
that all or most software developers in the company are trained in
secure coding skills. Security is an important requirement to include
in procurement specs for third-party tools or software purchased
from contractors.
Even if this tough stance on security slows down the application
development cycle and makes it harder to meet deadlines, it should
not matter. Secure coding practices ensure that the company avoids
undue embarrassment from security aws and breaches that could
inadvertently cause massive loss of reputation and customer good-
will. Further, as more and more business process experts insist on
secure coding practices, software vendors increasingly work toward
hardwiring security into software.
Categories of Modeling Technologies
The BPM space is not easy to understand because there is a huge
amount of activity at all levels. For a business process expert, it can be
a daunting task to determine which of the available BPM technologies
will actually be most helpful in achieving their goals. Only the largest
companies have a hope of actually productively employing all the BPM
technologies available. The following discussion explains the differ-
ent categories of BPM technologies and suggests ways that business
process experts may put them to use.
High-level Business Process Modeling
The highest level of BPM is one in which the components being
modeled are abstractions that contain a large amount of functionality
described in simplied form. This sort of modeling can be performed
when dening an enterprise architecture for a large company or
mapping out the structure of a large application or a process that ows
across many applications. An example could be the ARIS environment
created by IDS Scheer that allows modeling of business process compo-
nents and the relationships between them. These models can then be
used to control the conguration of enterprise applications, or as com-
munication devices, or for other forms of automated solution creation.
ARIS is currently used for SAP as well as Oracle systems.
Business process experts can use this form of modeling when
working in concert with enterprise architects or application experts
in designing end-to-end business processes. However, the downside is
that these types of tools do not allow for instantaneous deployment.
Detailed Business Process Modeling
While high level modeling creates a map of the process compo-
nents in use at a business, detailed business process modeling maps
out the details of how a process is implemented. This modeling is still
at a higher level than the logic used for implementation, but at this level
reusable services that are a part of service-oriented architecture (SOA)
start to appear as units of functionality that are invoked by elements of
the model. We will expand our discussion of SOA and its relation to the
business process expert in Technology Related to the Business Process
Expert as Solution Designer, later in this chapter.
Just a couple of years ago, there were many proprietary products at
this level of modeling, but a groundswell of momentum has established
Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) as a de facto standard.
Business process experts use this sort of modeling to accelerate the
design of solutions and to map out requirements in a detailed, unam-
biguous way.
From the Wiki: The Importance of BPM Security
Increasingly, business processes are moving outside the enter-
prise through the mobility of applications on laptops, PDAs, and
Blackberries, notes community member Ashish Mehta.
The business process expert must stay on top of this trend and
help to coordinate and organize the use of mobile technologies.
With the increase in oil prices, the need for telecommuting, web-
conferencing, and working from home is on the rise. It is important
that all the technology tools business process experts use are exible
and secure enough to accommodate this trend.
A suitable enterprisewide encryption policy must be implemented
in accordance with requisite compliance requirements, whether
Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), Payment Card Initiative (PCI), the Health
Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), or others.
Business process experts need to work with IT security ofcers, IT
administrators, and the CIO. Because business process modeling is
so strategic, encryption of each part of the cycle is essential. Think
what would happen if the business workow process ended up in
the hands of a competitor because of a stolen laptop. In particular,
workers must not turn off the encryption on their laptops in order
to speed them up, favoring convenience over security.
Software-Focused Modeling
Many of the models at the high level and detailed level end up being
used to create software, either automatically or through some manual
process of translation. But a large amount of effort has gone into mod-
eling the software itself, usually using the Unied Modeling Language
(UML), an object-oriented approach to describing the structure of
software. UML is a rich modeling environment that has had signicant
inuence on subsequent generations of modeling technology.
Business process experts may nd that UML is an appropriate way
to communicate with developers about the structure and requirements
for solutions.
Model-driven Development
Model-driven development is the practice of creating software
using modeling as the way to describe the structure and behavior of
the solution. All of the levels of modeling discussed so far are used by
different projects. Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is a
language for describing business process behavior based on web ser-
vices. Using BPEL, you can map out the invocations of a series of web
services and how the results of each web service will be used to invoke
the next one.
Model-driven development is clearly a part of BPM but it is more
relevant to the role of business process expert as solution designer
and we will discuss its use by business process experts in Technology
Related to the Business Process Expert as Solution Designer later in
this chapter.
Crawling, Walking, Running toward BPM
Exploiting BPM technology as a business process expert or in any
other role is not something that happens quickly or easily. A company
will not change from a mindset focused on applications and transac-
tions to one focused on business processes overnight.
David Frankel suggests that one approach to adoption of BPM
technologies is to think of a progression from crawling to walking to
running. Each company will have to come up with its progression
based on its own starting point and the existing technologies and skills
it supports. The following denition is just an example that suggests
how a business process expert might see the transition toward BPM
adoption.
Crawling: Adopting a BPM mindset
For most companies, crawling toward BPM maturity means that
when creating solutions, people start to think of the business process
rst and then ask how it can be supported. This is a signicantly differ-
ent way of thinking compared with the application-oriented mindset
at many companies.
When process descriptions are increasingly used as the basis of
requirements gathering and solution design, the company has started
to crawl toward BPM.
Walking: Connecting Services and BPM Technologies
A company can be considered to be walking toward BPM matu-
rity when it has started to create solutions based on model-driven
techniques and the entire enterprise architecture of the company is
described using BPM descriptions.
For this to happen, a company must also have signicant maturity
in terms of SOA. BPM models must have services to invoke in order to
record transactions and make things happen in the world of enterprise
applications. Services also are used to invoke external utility functions
and to interact with partners. For BPM to be effective, a signicant
number of services must be available either through service-enabled
enterprise applications, homegrown development, or third parties.
Running: Model-driven Process Automation
A company can be said to be running in terms of BPM maturity
when the solutions are controlled primarily using BPM mechanisms.
Application conguration, coding of services, and other techniques will
always be in use, but, at some point the bulk of the work in a company
will shift from development to modeling. It is at this point that a
company can be said to be off and running in terms of BPM maturity.
Technology Related to the Business Process Expert as Solution
Designer
Business process experts who play the role of solution designer
work under the hood of an application, making sure that the process is
automated in a way that balances the needs of the business process, the
functionality of the application, and the technical capabilities of the
organization. In this role, the business process expert uses empathy
for the needs of the business, combined with an intimate knowledge of
the available development and software conguration tools, to make
whatever tradeoffs are needed to create a exible solution for the lowest
cost.
The ideal technology landscape for a business process expert
playing the role of solution designer is one that is rich in services, appli-
cation functionality, and development tools, so that the tradeoffs and
compromises are as small as possible.
SOA Infrastructure
Increasing the maturity of the SOA infrastructure in the technology
landscape is perhaps the single most important way to help empower
business process experts to make a positive contribution to a company.
The journey to SOA maturity is not something that can happen over-
night, and the level of infrastructure needed will vary from company to
company. Here are a few elements of SOA infrastructure maturity that
will assist business process experts in doing their jobs:
Service-enabled applications provide the raw materials so that
BPM tools can create solutions that use and transform information
in systems of record
A services repository provides a directory where services can be
found along with descriptions of their interfaces, functionality, and
usage characteristics
Service development tools allow custom and composite services to
be created and added to the repository
SOA governance provides a framework for deciding which new
services to create, which service-enabled applications to deploy,
and how people who use services can sign up to use them in the
context of service-level agreements that describe the responsibili-
ties of service providers and consumers
An SOA operational environment provides the tools needed to
manage the provisioning, operational monitoring, and dependen-
cies between services that are deployed to support applications.
SOA training teaches the skills needed to promote adoption
Enterprise architecture provides the big picture view that makes
sense of which services are provided by whom and how they should
be used to support core business processes
The more of the infrastructure just described that is in place, the
more raw materials a business process expert has to work with.
Model-driven Application Conguration Tools
Enterprise applications and other software solutions are increas-
ingly adopting BPM methods in their design and conguration. These
methods allow end-to-end processes to be specied using high-level
modeling tools like ARIS. The high-level process descriptions are then
used to guide the conguration of the applications to implement the
end-to-end processes and also allow the applications to be monitored at
the level of business transactions, not just in terms of software metrics
such as disk space, memory, and database transactions.
Model-driven Development Tools
Business process experts thrive when solution creation is acceler-
ated by model-driven tools. These tools speed the creation of solutions
and emphasize the nature of the business process as the central focus.
Model-driven tools simplify development by allowing those creating
the solution to express the relationships that dene the solution using
higher level simplied abstractions.
Model-driven tools allow business process experts to create solu-
tions faster, to teach others to build solutions, and to adapt solutions
more rapidly to changing business conditions. Because creating and
adapting solutions is easier, business process experts can support agile
development methods based on rapid iterations.
The universe of model-driven development tools covers a lot of
ground and can include any of the following technologies:
User-interface widget frameworks allow users to assemble dash-
boards that bring together information from many services. As
these frameworks mature, they are allowing more complicated
relationships and interactivity to be expressed between the widgets
using event mechanisms
Mashup and composition environments allow users to assemble
more complicated solutions from collections of services. In the
simpler mashup environments, it is not possible to express much
application logic, but the more advanced composition environ-
ments allow complicated logic to be expressed to process the results
of service invocations
BPM application development environments allow applications
to be dened in term of high-level business process abstractions.
Frequently, BPMN or BPEL is used to describe business processes.
Visual development environments are model-driven development
environments that emphasize graphical description of solutions
Partner Solutions and Services Marketplaces
The landscape for functionality for almost every domain of enter-
prise computing contains offerings from independent software vendors
and services offered over the Internet in various forms of cloud com-
puting such as software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service. These
solutions can play key roles in supporting and automating processes
and can be incorporated by embedding the functionality in existing
user interfaces, through web services, or using other forms of integra-
tion, such as Adobe Interactive Forms.
These categories are far from comprehensive and overlap to a
certain degree. Some development environments combine aspects of
all the categories mentioned. It is unlikely that even the largest compa-
nies will employ all of these tools. The main point for business process
experts is that a company that wisely chooses tools that t in with its
application strategy will nd that they are more productive in promot-
ing creation of effective solutions.
Empowerment Coach
Business process experts who play the role of empowerment coach
seek to help people do things for themselves. For business staff, this
may mean learning how to develop solutions using model-driven devel-
opment tools. For technical staff, empowerment may mean learning
to use collaborative tools to promote communication between team
members.
The technology landscape for the business process expert as
empowerment coach can include any of the technologies used so far.
However, it is believed that the use of community and collective col-
laboration tools such as wikis, forums, blogs, and video will accelerate
the notion of empowerment.
The empowerment coach role encompasses all the other roles,
encouraging the use of the right technology to enable users to create,
or aid in creating, solutions that meet their needs, as well as identifying
the key evangelists that can carry the business process imperative and
solutions forward in the realms of their ecosystem.
Innovator
Business process experts who act as innovators need to work with
many different kinds of people using various collaborative techniques.
When a business process expert has a primary responsibility for inno-
vation, he may need a way to develop ideas from early stages to a more
mature form by bringing in a multi-disciplinary team. In such cases,
wikis provide a valuable environment, as do blogs and forums, either
publicly available or with restricted access. Using these tools, an idea
can be taken from a seed into a more mature form that is ready for wider
evaluation.
Many companies are nding that social networking is a valuable
tool for people with like interests to come together for collaboration,
knowledge sharing, and brainstorming. This general technique can be
use to organically assemble teams for innovating in particular areas.
Social networking voting mechanisms and environments such as
research marketplaces can be used to evaluate proposals for innova-
tion, supplementing the evaluation process with a form of the wisdom
of crowds.
109
7
Patterns of Success
Enough experience has been gained by people who have worked
as business process experts at companies throughout the world that
patterns of success and failure are starting to emerge. Some of these
patterns are proven while others are more speculative, but all of them
come from the experience of business process experts.
Pattern is a word that is used in many senses in the world of soft-
ware and technology. The meaning that we want to use in this chapter
is the idea of a pattern of behavior or the application of technology that
helps business process experts achieve repeatable successes. Patterns
could be as simple as the idea of using a blog to keep track of project
management information and a wiki to record requirements or create
associated help documentation. Another pattern might be the sug-
gestion to use graphical business process modeling notation (BPMN),
also called swim lanes, to capture process descriptions during require-
ments gathering, even though you have no intention of using BPMN for
automating solution creation.
This chapter is intended to be a repository for patterns of behavior
and application of technology that have proven helpful to business
process experts. It will always be a work in progress. In its current
form, this exists as a request for content to be provided by the business
process expert community (BPX community for short). Please feel free
to add anything in this chapter that helps achieve repeatable success
by visiting the wiki for this book. Simply google Your Community BPX
book or visit:
https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/wiki?path=/display/SEB/Main
The following headings and questions are only suggestions for
ways to get started. The authors hope that members of the community
feel inspired to add their experience to the wiki and move this chapter
in any direction that may be helpful. The authors would like to thank
Paul Taylor, from Kraft, for adding the rst two patterns of success,
included in the next section.
Patterns That Promote Adoption of the Business Process
Expert Role
Our research so far has revealed that the most common pattern
of adoption of the business process expert role involves an individual
being inspired, then learning more about the role through the business
process expert community, then performing the role at a company,
which generally leads to wider recognition of its value and some form
of institutional adoption. This is just one pattern however. Paul Taylor
mentions two other patterns that lay the groundwork for successful
adoption of the business process expert role: enterprise architecture
and business process management (BPM).
When looking at the key patterns that determine the successful
introduction of the business process expert role to organizations, a
couple clearly stand out.
Enterprise Architecture
A formal approach to Enterprise Architecture (EA) helps mandate
an alignment between key business and IT strategies. Not only will this
prepare the ground for nding common agreement on todays require-
ments, but more importantly, it outlines the IT capabilities needed for
the organization to be successful in the future. This high-level align-
Chapter 7: Patterns of Success 111
ment will in turn provide support and help sustain a edgling business
process expert biosphere within an organization.
The EA style in question is not the main point here. It does not
really matter whether an organization has deployed The Open Group
Architecture Framework (TOGAF), the Zachman Framework, or
another EA framework such as the SAP Reference Architecture. What
matters is that the business process expert has a clear starting base
when looking at the business process requirements and capabilities
that need to be deployed in the future, and that they can be reason-
ably sure of the roadmap required to get there. This gives them a head
start on trying to identify the areas that need to be addressed rst and
potentially the toolsets they will be able to use.
One other key element and outcome of this is the formation of
architecture domains that focus on distinct business process (and
technology) areas where both IT and businesspeople mingle together.
This not only helps to break down barriers between business and IT,
but also helps identify people who have the potential to take on a busi-
ness process expert role in the future.
BPM
A formal approach to Business Process Management (BPM) helps
the business process expert nd traction within an organization in a
number of ways. Such a framework provides a consistent approach to
business process design as well as a means to monitor business pro-
cesses. Thus armed with this approach, the business process expert can
build on a solid foundation that provides a common way to describe
business processes:
The BPM notation to be used is agreed upon by business and IT,
whether in the form of BPMN or Enterprise Process Center (EPC),
and a consistent approach is used
A method for business process execution has already been agreed
upon by using either core ERP systems or leveraging composite
applications across a composition environment such as that found
in SAP NetWeaver 7.1 or both
Approaches to business process design have already been codifed
within an organization and there are likely to be appropriate busi-
ness process owners with whom the business process expert can
work
Business process governance channels have already been set up
and approval paths identied, and thus the key design elements
and decisions can be readily approved or escalated as appropriate
An agreed-upon business process improvement framework should
have been established with clear requirements regarding measuring
and justifying business process improvements. This allows the busi-
ness process expert to condently present the right types of improve-
ments, ones that show the highest returns to the organization for any
given scenario and that are consistent with previous business cases
presented.
Identifying Additional Patterns
Here is a set of questions that may help identify additional patterns
that may be useful in accelerating adoption of the business process
expert role:
How was the business process expert role adopted at your
company?
What barriers stood in the way of initial adoption?
What barriers stood in the way of widespread adoption?
How did you overcome those barriers?
What methods proved effective for training people in the business
process expert role?
What methods proved effective for explaining the role to a wider
audience?
How has the practice of the business process experts at your
company been improved based on experience?
Chapter 7: Patterns of Success 113
Patterns That Promote Creation of Successful Solutions
Business process experts play a central role in the solution creation
process, advocating for the business process perspective and a process
rst mentality. Business process experts report that they provide
assistance clarifying the business requirements and the expression
of those requirements in a denition of an ideal process. Using their
empathy for business requirements, and their ability to translate that
vision into a form that the technology department can understand,
is another function that business process experts often carry out.
Business process experts are also involved in the design of solutions,
working closely with enterprise architects and software developers.
Here is a set of questions that may help identify patterns useful in
creating effective solutions:
How do you describe the ideal end-to-end process and communi-
cate it to the team?
How do you solicit comments on the proposed process and incor-
porate suggestions from all stakeholders?
How do you confrm that the ideal process is in fact ideal?
How do you use iterative development methods?
How do you map the ideal process to the available technology?
How do you decide when to compromise on implementing the ideal
process and use existing functionality instead?
How do you justify the cost of custom development to implement
parts of the ideal process?
How do you work with the technology team to design solutions?
Patterns of Communication and Collaboration
Frequently, business process experts arrive in the wake of one or
more failures to create solutions that were urgently needed. While, in
most cases, there are many things going wrong at once, poor commu-
nication is almost always one of the causes along with limited support
for needed collaboration. One of the most difcult and effective things
that a business process expert can do is to build trust so that commu-
nication is restored and then to teach new methods of working together
to keep that communication owing.
Here is a set of questions that may help identify patterns of com-
munication and collaboration:
How do you determine what went wrong with communication and
collaboration on failed projects?
How do you build trust so that people are motivated to
communicate?
How do you restore enthusiasm in the wake of failed projects?
How do you introduce support for collaboration?
How do you document processes so they can be widely
understood?
What patterns of meetings keep people on the same page?
What project management methods tend to help restore effective
communication and collaboration?
Patterns of Organizational Structure
The business process expert role does not have a natural home.
Some organizations have business process experts reporting to IT,
others have them reporting to the ofce of the CFO or COO, while
still others have them reporting to lines of business. Business process
experts are sometimes full-time employees who work on many projects
across lines of business and other times are people selected from lines
of business who spend part of their time working as business process
experts. Organizational structure for the business process expert is
highly dependent on the characteristics of each individual business.
Here is a set of questions that may help identify patterns of success-
ful organizational structure for the business process expert role:
To whom do business process experts report?
Is there a center of excellence and an internal community for busi-
ness process experts?
How is the value provided by business process experts measured?
Are there variations in the roles played by different business process
experts?
115
Afterword: What We Learned about Writing
a BPX Community Book
Now that the BPX community book project has reached another
milestone, the completion of the second version, it is time to take stock
and share what we have learned and how to improve the next time, as
well as show leadership to other wiki book initiatives that might arise
from this project.
The key takeaway is that it appears possible to combine the skills of
professional writers with the emergent energy of community members,
whose enthusiasm is directly related to their sense of ownership in
guiding the shape of the content and making sure it serves the needs of
other community members.
The key tension that was reconciled in the hybrid process was
between the need for individual virtuosity that is the source of great
writing and compelling narratives and the need to preserve enthusiasm
from the community, which must be able to push the content in any
direction that it feels must be followed. To completely understand what
we have learned, the story of how this book came to be must be told.
The Collaborative Process
When the BPX community team asked the professional writing
team at Evolved Media to join in the creation of a book about the
business process expert role, everyone was extremely excited by the
challenge. Evolved Media had created 10 books, including two book-
length projects published on wikis (SAP Business One To Go and the
Enterprise Service Bundles documentation). So, the idea of creating a
book published on a wiki using a process that combined professional
skills with contributions from members of the BPX community was an
appealing idea.
Everyone involved brought a wealth of experience to the project.
Marco ten Vaanholt, Global Head of the SAP Business Process Expert
community, was present at the creation of the community and has
an extensive network of experts with a wide variety of experience in
making the business process expert role work effectively. (See the
Preface section for a list of everyone who contributed.) Dan Woods,
CTO and Editor of Evolved Media, had written Wikis for Dummies and
had used wikis for more than 9 years in various ways. Dan has been
studying the way that people use SAP software for more than 5 years.
The most valuable asset is the BPX community, hundreds of thousands
of people who are making the role work in all sorts of companies.
The process used to create the rst two versions of the book was a
modied version of the Communication by Design methodology that
Evolved Media uses to write its books and that was heavily inuenced
by the idea of the Tom Sawyer wiki.
AFterword: What We Learned about Writing a BPX Community Book 117
Communication by Design
Evolved Media writes books using a method called Communication
by Design that combines aspects of journalistic practice with software
development methodology. The method works through a division of
labor that involves the following roles:
The editor/analyst is the equivalent of a software architect. This
person designs the content, performs the research interviews (all of
which are transcribed), and writes the most important parts.
Content owners are the sponsors of the project who work with
the editor/analyst to make sure that the content being created
fullls the intended mission as described in a content requirements
document.
Subject matter experts are people with knowledge and experi-
ence about the context for the content and the concepts and argu-
ments that will be explained.
Writers are people who take the content requirements, the
content design, the transcribed interviews, and other research
materials and write rst drafts.
Copyeditors, transcriptionists, graphic designers, production
editors, and various other staff all play key roles in creating the
content.
The content creation process takes place through each of these
roles participating in the following steps:
Content requirements: The content owners and editor/analyst
document the mission of the content and the requirements by which
success will be judged.
Initial research and content design: A series of initial interviews
by the editor/analyst with subject matter experts helps deter-
mine a content design, an outline of content that will meet the
requirements.
Content design review and research plan: The content owners
review the content design with the editor/analyst, improvements are
made, and then subject matter experts are assigned to each part of
the content.
(continued page 118)
Research: The editor/analyst interviews the subject matter experts
about specic portions of the content design. The interviews are
transcribed. Other research materials are collected and associated
with specic portions of the content design.
First draft: The editor/analyst or writers takes all interviews and
research associated with a specic portion of the content design
and writes a rst draft that is reviewed and improved by the editor/
analyst.
Review: The rst draft is reviewed by the content owners and
other subject matter experts, who make comments and suggest
improvements.
Second and subsequent drafts: Further research is performed
and renements are made to the content design as needed. Second
drafts and subsequent are then created by the writers, which are
reviewed by the content owners and subject matter experts.
This process allows the knowledge of numerous subject matter
experts to be harvested and focused on creating content with a spe-
cic mission. Each role in the process performs the task best suited to
their skills. Evolved Medias books are routinely based on more than
100 interviews with subject matter experts.
Starting in February 2008, the Communication by Design process
was used to create a rst draft based on interviews with subject matter
experts suggested by Marco ten Vaanholt. The content design and rst
drafts were posted on the BPX community wiki in April where com-
munity members weighed in with comments and additional content.
Avoiding the Tom Sawyer Wiki
This process avoided a phenomenon Dan Woods calls the Tom
Sawyer wiki (see http://www.evolvedtechnologist.com/section/
stories/avoiding-tom-sawyer-wiki). Such wikis are attempts to create
content in which someone puts up an empty wiki, perhaps with pages
dedicated to specic concepts or questions, but then expects the com-
munity to do all the work of creating the content. Tom Sawyer wikis are
a sure way to fail.
What is a Tom Sawyer Wiki
In the eponymous book, Tom Sawyer, a character invented by
Mark Twain, is a clever boy who has to paint a fence as a punish-
ment. Instead of doing the work himself, he pretends to be having
a great time doing the work and presents the task to his friends as
an honor. Tom Sawyer succeeds in conning his friends out of some of
their possessions for the privilege of painting the fence for Tom.
Tom Sawyer wikis are exactly the same thing. Someone creates a
wiki, a remarkably easy thing to do nowadays, and then announces
to the world that the wiki is open and ready for painting, that
is, content creation. The problem is that the wiki has no content.
Perhaps the wiki reects some taxonomy, but there is no there there.
The creators of Tom Sawyer wikis expect that other people will now
see the task of lling the wiki with content as a great honor.
Lessons from a Book in Progress
The experience of creating the rst and second versions of the
BPX book led us to the realization that we must nd a new way. The
Communication by Design process worked well and a strong rst draft
was improved by review both from the content owners, subject matter
experts, and from the community. The second draft is even stronger
and reects many new ideas.
However, the content creation process did not draw as many com-
ments and contributors as expected from the BPX community. While
there could be many reasons for this, we suspect that even though the
writing team went rst, the BPX book project still seemed to many like
a Tom Sawyer project in an important way. Community members were
not asked to create the rst draft, and because of this they did not feel a
strong connection to the rst draft either.
The question is how can the community feel genuine ownership
but not be burdened with having to do all of the work?
How to Increase Community Participation
The new method proposed here will have to be tried out on a new
project, or on additional chapters for this project. If this process works
well, it may represent a signicant step forward in harnessing the power
of a community authoring.
To avoid a Tom Sawyer wiki, someone must go rst. Great content
comes when a properly prepared individual, with experience and
writing skill, absorbs a body of knowledge and then creates a narra-
tive to communicate that knowledge to others. A properly prepared
individual will always beat a self-organizing community in the amount
and quality of content that is created.
But how can the community play a role?
The suggested remedy to the challenge of community ownership
versus individual virtuosity is embedded in the following method
for community content creation that is accelerated by a professional
team.
For this to work, the community must be brought in much earlier,
participating in the design process and having a say about the mission
of the content. Then they can feel that they went rst in creating the
content. All of this interaction would take place on a wiki.
Step 1: Exploration: Mapping questions and concepts
In this step, the community is asked what content should be
created. The community is requested to supply questions that need
to be answered, topics that need to be explained, cases that should
be made, research materials that would be helpful, and so on.
At the same time, community members will be asked about the role
they are willing to play. Are they willing to be interviewed? To refer
experts to the project? To review content? To write?
Step 2: Determine the mission
Based on the ideas gathered during the exploration, at least two and
possibly more missions for the content are created. These missions
must contain a statement of what content would be created, the
sort of subject matter experts who would be involved, and a listing
of the community members who would support the mission based
on their willingness to participate in the ways listed above.
The missions would be open for comment and suggestion and
renement.
Eventually the community would vote on which mission to
pursue.
Step 3: Research Coverage
The writing team would then take the mission that was chosen and
execute the Communication by Design process as described above,
using the community members and other participants suggested
by the content owners.
A content design would be created and commented on. Research
into all topics would be performed. A rst draft would be created
and commented on by the community and other reviewers.
Step 4: Refactoring and Filling Holes
Based on the review of the frst draft, the content design may be
improved, as it was in the BPX book from the rst to the second
version, and further research may be performed. The comments on
the rst draft and, if needed, additional research and interviews
would be used to create a second draft.
Step 5: Renement and Polishing
The second and subsequent drafts would be created and reviewed
until the content was declared complete.
Using this process, the community would have ownership and
a more substantial role, but would not have to go rst and ll in the
blanks in a Tom Sawyer wiki.
Will this work? Perhaps; perhaps not. The only way to know is to
try. We hope the BPX community can start such a project in the near
future. We hope you have enjoyed this rst stab at dening the busi-
ness process expert role and we hope that it claries many of the open
questions. We look forward to more input as the community grows. On
behalf of the community, I would like to thank you for your current and
future contributions.
Marco ten Vaanholt
To order copies of this book:
To order fewer than 10 copies:
Please visit www.evolvedtechnologist.com/bpx
or order directly from Amazon:
Go to www.Amazon.com
and search process rst bpx
To order 10 or more copies:
Evolved Media offers a bulk discount for 10 or more copies.
To order, contact Ruth Voorhies at:
books@evolvedmedia.com
(646) 827-2196

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